Death of a Nightingale

UKRAINE, 1935

“What kind of person are you if you believe in God?”

Comrade Semienova rose from her desk and looked at the class with a mild, questioning gaze.

Olga squirmed on the bench. The question wasn’t difficult, and she knew what she was supposed to answer if she was asked. People who believed in God were anti-Soviet and not quite right in the head, and like the kulaks, they wouldn’t work and especially not on Sundays. The kulaks wanted to be fed by the proletariat, and the religious by their God, and their faith was so strong that they would rather starve and freeze to death in the street than acknowledge that they were wrong.

That was the truth.

But in a way there were more truths than that, and they rubbed strangely against one other in her head and made her uncomfortable as she sat on the hard school bench. Because Olga remembered that her grandmother had had a little gold crucifix hanging under her blouse that she sometimes pulled out and kissed with her big, wet lips, and that must mean that she believed in God, even if she worked with her hoe out in the turnip field until the midday heat forced her inside.

Her grandmother died three summers ago. She had been found out in the field lying next to her hoe. Father and Mother and Oxana and Olga had taken the train from Kharkiv to be part of singing her out, and even though Olga was smaller then, she could still remember the stench in the tiny living room where Grandmother lay waiting for the burial party. It was because she had been lying there too long, Father said then. Much too long, out there in the field. Even now Olga hated to think about it—Grandmother in the field in the roasting afternoon sun. Even if Grandmother had believed in God.

Olga would have liked to ask Comrade Semienova if work in the turnip field didn’t count as work for the Soviet state for some reason, because perhaps that was the explanation. But she didn’t dare. If there were something wrong with Grandmother, it would be embarrassing for both Oxana and her. Comrade Semienova would definitely frown and might even get angry.

And that must not happen.

Comrade Semienova was the most beautiful thing Olga had ever seen, and she knew that Oxana felt the same way. Small and straight and with hair as fair and shiny as stalks of wheat. When someone answered correctly or when there was particularly good news from Uncle Stalin in Moscow, her glowing smile brought out two lovely dimples in her soft cheeks. She smoked cigarettes like a man, which somehow seemed incredible and wonderful.

She had come from Leningrad, arriving in the early spring to replace old Volodymyr Pavlenko, who had died of hunger-typhoid sometime during the winter.

The school had been closed until April because there wasn’t wood or petroleum, and therefore no one knew how long old Pavlenko had lain dead and frozen solid in the house at the back of the school. Because he was frozen, he didn’t smell like Grandmother had, but Olga couldn’t help shuddering when she thought about it. Still, that was long ago, and now it was autumn.

“Fedir? How does the religious person think?”

Comrade Semienova let her gaze rest on Fedir, who sat all the way at the back of the class. He was thirteen and strong as an ox but also similarly slow.

“They are stupid.” Fedir grasped for more words. “They want to steal from the people.”

Jana, who sat next to Olga, groaned quietly and imitated Fedir’s slightly out-of-focus gaze and open mouth. But Comrade Semienova was satisfied.

“Correct, Fedir,” she said and lit up with her wonderful smile. “But you can also express it in a different way. Oxana?”

“They are counterrevolutionary parasites who do not wish to have a strong state.”

Now it was Olga’s turn to groan. Oxana was good at remembering all the long words. The best in the entire class, and that was probably why she also sometimes dared to stand next to Comrade Semienova’s desk after class to speak with her at length. Oxana was neither shy nor afraid she might blush and stammer. It was annoying and disgusting to watch, Olga thought, because Oxana wasn’t that much better than Olga and Jana. She just had no shame. But the worst thing was that Comrade Semienova couldn’t see that Oxana was sucking up to her. On the contrary, it seemed as if she liked speaking with Oxana and in fact listened to what she said, even though Oxana was only ten and Comrade Semienova at least twenty. As if they were friends.

Now she nodded to Oxana with a confidentiality she didn’t share with any of the other children. Then she raised her voice.

“Comrade Oxana is the best student in this school,” she said, offering a slender hand in Oxana’s direction. “Therefore, I have decided that she is to accompany me next week to a group meeting with Komsomol and the pioneer division in Kharkiv. I would like Oxana to sing the Internationale.”

The class was completely silent. Even that little worm Sergej, who sat next to Jana, had for once stopped rolling boogers on the table and was keeping his arms and legs still at the same time.

Now Oxana was blushing. It was from pride, not shame, thought Olga.

“Oxana is talented,” Semienova continued. “But you should know that we all, regardless of abilities, must strive to be better comrades, to work harder for Uncle Stalin’s ideas about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Next time it could be one of you going along to Kharkiv if you work hard and improve yourselves.”

Jana bent her head toward Olga and stuck her index and middle fingers into her mouth with a telling gagging gesture. Olga giggled deliberately. But inside something had begin to gnaw and rub, like the many truths she saw. Were you allowed to hate your own sister? She had a feeling that both Uncle Stalin and Semienova would disapprove of her thoughts if they knew of them, but it was hard enough to control her words and behavior. To control her thoughts was completely impossible. No matter how hard she tried, they often drifted into black areas and made her think that she might be a kulak, or on her way to becoming one. There were things she wished to have, even though no one was supposed to own anything. Bread and silk dresses and shiny headbands. And Semienova.

That was why she had begged and made a spectacle of herself—as Jana put it—until she had been included in one of the photographs taken when Oxana had been chosen as the school’s model student in September. Semienova got the Pioneer magazine to come all the way to Mykolayevka. Of course, only the picture of Oxana made it into the newspaper, but Semienova had also asked to have the other developed and had placed it next to her bed in the room behind the schoolroom. Olga knew that she was included because Semienova had felt sorry for her, but the picture was a nice one all the same, with Olga and Oxana in the beautiful and almost identical traditional dresses Mother had sewn for them when they still lived in Kharkiv.

Olga wished that she was the one Semienova had chosen to sing at the pioneer meeting, and she wished that Oxana wasn’t so beautiful, didn’t have such blue eyes and didn’t sing like the stupid, goddamn nightingale in the poplar tree down by the stream.

OXANA’S CHEEKS WERE still blushing when they passed the last house in the village and continued on the dirt road between the hills.

The trip to school was terribly long now, ever since they had moved out to Grandfather’s farm, and every day when they passed by the old house, Olga cursed the widow Svetlova and her bloated cow tits. All Jana had to do was run along to the Petrenkos’ house right next door, while Olga and Oxana had to trudge along the stream and over the rise. It was all right while it was summer and the road was dry and warm so that you could take off your socks and shoes and walk barefoot. But now it was September, and the rain had already transformed the road into two black muddy wheel tracks. Neither their bark shoes nor the extra socks could prevent the cold mud from getting all the way in between their toes as they walked. Disgusting.

In addition, on the road to Grandfather’s, there were Former Human Beings who had dug themselves dirt hole shelters among the birch trees and sat staring at them with starving eyes as they passed by. Sometimes they whispered and hissed up there among the trunks, begging for bread—“khleb, khleb”—but mostly they just stared. The worst was the children wandering around with bloated bellies and sores on their arms and legs. Most of those children had disappeared during the winter. The ones who remained were more dead than alive, and Olga had more than once thought about giving them a piece of her bread.

But hunger gnawed at her too—every day, all the time. Through gruel and porridge and nettle soup. When she closed her eyes, she thought about all the things she had eaten when she was younger. Whole plates filled with potatoes roasted in oil. Salt pork and sausage and cheese and pierogi. It would all come back, Oxana said, and she also said that Olga had to be strong and save her bread for herself, because the children among the birches were already marked for death by scurvy and typhoid. No matter how much bread they ate now, they would die, crushed between the great millstones golod and kholod—hunger and cold. Olga could not ease their suffering with a single piece of bread. And Olga knew that Oxana was right. In the spring she had seen boys by the pond behind the house catching tadpoles and swallowing them live. That kind of hunger consumed everything and could not be satisfied by Olga’s two half-eaten crusts, and every time she had the thought, she let her bread slip back into her pocket and felt how her stomach, which at first had protested in panic, grew calm again.

Once she had decided to keep the bread, she discovered that she actually hated the Former Human Beings. They had stolen from the peasants and now sat there begging bread from her, so terribly hungry herself, who had never stolen as much as a stalk of wheat. That truth warmed her all the way down into the pit of her stomach. But she was still angry at Father too, because it was his fault that they had to walk the long way through the birch grove every day.

It was Father’s fault that they had had to move. Father and Svetlova’s cow tits.

Jana had told her that Svetlova had moved into their old house with Father just two days after Grandfather had come with the horse and wagon to collect Mother, Oxana, Kolja and her, and that Svetlova on that very same day had used Mother’s laundry bucket to rinse her dirty underwear and hang it up on the veranda so everyone could see it. Mother had cried when she heard, and after that no one spoke of Father any longer. It was forbidden.

“Just think,” said Oxana dreamily. “A whole day in Kharkiv, and I’m going by train with Comrade Semienova.”

“Hmmmm.”

Only once in her life had Olga traveled by train, and that was when they had to attend Grandmother’s funeral. Otherwise, she had only seen them at a distance in the railroad town of Sorokivka. You needed permission from the GPU for that kind of travel. And money. Something occurred to her.

“But who will pay for your ticket?” asked Olga. “It costs at least five rubles.”

“It will be taken care of,” said Oxana importantly. “I’ve already discussed it with Comrade Semienova. Oh, Olga, I wish that you could come too.”

Olga shrugged and smiled faintly. It was hard to resist Oxana when she was happy. And Olga wished that she would be happy all the time because then she herself might escape from the gnawing and disconcerting worms inside.

“Maybe you could ask Comrade Semienova if I could come along. We can sing together. ‘Zelene Zhyto’—‘The green, green wheat.’ We know it. We can do it in harmony.”

Olga hummed the first soft notes of the song that Mother had taught them. A harvest song that everyone who had grown up in a village had heard in the fields when the wheat and oat were harvested. But Oxana just shook her head.

“I don’t think so.” There was genuine sympathy in her voice. “Only one student can be selected from each school in Kharkivka Oblast, and besides, you are still much too young to understand what a political meeting like that is about. That’s not at all the kind of song you sing there.”

She looked around and quickly handed Olga a piece of bread. They never ate in school. Oxana especially didn’t like the hungry eyes of the others, and Mother had carefully instructed them never to show that they had bread. Instead, they crumbled the bread into little pieces and ate them quickly and discreetly on the way home. Preferably before they reached the birch trees.

Comrade Semienova said it was the dirt-hole people’s own fault that they were starving, and that was another truth. Olga knew that it was true. Still, it was nasty that they were there, and she was happy when Oxana described how everyone would be fine as soon as the next five-year plan was put into action. Uncle Stalin would make the country so rich that even the Former Human Beings would acknowledge their mistakes and receive salt pork and butter on their bread every day. Oxana was certain because she knew it from Comrade Semienova, who told her things that were not said in class. Great things were on the way, she said and winked teasingly.

“Soon, little Olga, you’ll be able to stuff yourself. You’ll become so fat that Sergej will need longer arms if he is to reach all the way around you when you kiss.”

Olga couldn’t help laughing and swatted at Oxana, who broke into a clumsy gallop toward the house. Oxana’s bark shoes sank into the mud with small, soft squelches, and she lifted her dress so you could see her thin, stockinged legs and large, bony knees.

For a brief moment, she turned her head and looked back at Olga. Her blue eyes glittered savagely and exuberantly above narrow rose-colored cheeks. Behind her, the chestnut’s wine-red leaves and the yellowing birch trees shone vividly, and all at once Olga felt a choking fear shoot up, paralyzing her as she stood in the muddy wheel track. A sort of premonition.

“Oxana,” she said, “don’t go.”

But Oxana didn’t hear her.