Death of a Nightingale

It was strange the way a change in your perspective could change a place.

The Coal-House Camp had been Natasha’s home for many months, but from the edge of the woods, it looked foreign to her again. She was staring narrow-eyed down at the children’s barrack from the little hiding place she had arranged under some low-hanging pine branches. It was dark now and had been for a long time. The evening had drifted into night while she’d sat hunched in her hiding place, but she felt no tiredness—just a background throb in her fingers and toes.

The camp’s low barracks seemed stooped against the cold. The snow veiled the walkways, lawns and benches and made Natasha think of the cotton-ball snow landscape Katerina and she had been allowed to construct together in the prison’s creative workshop last year. Katerina had arranged a cave for elves under a substantial piece of bark and placed other elves made of pipe cleaners outside the cave and on the little mirror that was supposed to look like a snow-covered pond.

“Should we add a troll too?” she had asked and had hesitantly run a hand through the box filled with wooden beads and pinecones.

“There are no trolls in elf-land,” said Natasha.

“And not in real life either?”

Katerina’s tone was different, and Natasha’s trained ears instantly picked up a change in the rhythm of her breathing.

“Definitely not in real life,” Natasha had said, as solidly and calmly as possible.

“But the camp isn’t elf land.” Natasha could hear Anna as clearly as if she had been standing next to her in the glittering snow. “The camp is a trap. You are the fox, and Katerina is the juicy piece of meat in the trap.”

“I know,” whispered Natasha. “I’ll be careful.”

The sense that Anna was with her evaporated as soon as she spoke out loud. No one was looking out for her now. The dark was dark, the cold was cold, and she was alone.

A thin but feminine shape moved behind the third window from the left. She assumed it was Nina. It was good that there was a woman with Katerina, but at the same time, it made things more complicated. Natasha opened and closed her hand around the knife handle in her pocket and attempted to hold back the racing panic that made her heart beat much too hard and fast. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, closed her eyes for a moment and concentrated on the weight of her body pressing against the earth, the cold air, the tree trunk’s gnarly contours when she leaned back a little.

They had to get away, she and Katerina. Evil had come to Denmark now, and it was no longer safe here. But as long as Nina was awake and sat in Katerina’s room with the lights on, Natasha had to wait. Anything else would be too risky. She would be seen. Nina would raise the alarm and call the police.

She tried to think about something else. About the very first days in the camp when Denmark had still looked like a safe haven. In the little leaflet she was given, it said that Denmark was a democracy, and that there were more pigs than people living here, as if the two were somehow connected. On the way here, she had seen the great refrigerated trucks with pictures of grinning porkers on the side, and for some reason it made all the horrors fade a little then. As if nothing wicked could reach her here in this ridiculous little, flat Bacon Land, where even the pigs smiled on their way to the slaughterhouse. Back then the fence had seemed a protection against the dangers she had run from. Even the most ordinary things—for example, the sight of the plastic chairs that were stacked every evening on the tables in the cafeteria with their legs up—brought tears to her eyes because it all seemed so ordered and calm. Even the fact that everything was so worn and nothing was clean for very long, even that was somehow reassuring—they weren’t in Kiev anymore, in the apartment’s traitorous luxury; it was more like Kurakhovo and the smell of her childhood. Katerina’s sheets were patterned with nice little Scandinavian trolls, and Natasha had an odd feeling of being at summer camp with a lot of friendly people who were not out to kill her.

Later the despair set in. The grey fear of rejection cast a pall over the contours of the camp. As inhabitants disappeared, she knew she risked the same thing—knew the only thing she had won with her flight was a delay. She saw the fence for what it really was: a barrier to control the people inside, not a protection against the rest of the world. The greatest danger of all was let in through the main gate in the form of the apparently good-natured policemen who came to collect those who were being sent home. Even the Moomintrolls on Katerina’s comforter began to look cruel, with devilish, taunting, superior smiles.

Then she had met Michael. It wasn’t the way it had been with Pavel, not a dizzy falling in love, more a form of physical gratitude. Mixed with her desire for him and inseparable from it was the desire for permanent safety. She had loved him because he was a way out. So she had believed back then, and that belief made the camp fade away even while Katerina and she were still living there. It had become insignificant, a temporary refuge, no more. The sheets were weighted with neither hope or despair; they were just sheets.

The light went out in the third window from the left. A kind of electric shock raced through Natasha’s body, as if the switch in Katerina’s room were directly connected with her own nervous system. Now! Nina had either left the room or gone to sleep. Natasha believed she could overpower the nurse if necessary. Physically she was stronger than ever. It was easy if you had enough time. You stepped onto the edge of your bed and down again—first on your left leg, then on your right—a thousand times in the course of a day, every day. Then you lay down on the cell floor with your arms behind your neck and pulled your head up to your knees just as many times. Then came the push-ups. When she lay in her bed at night, she could feel her stomach muscles under the skin like steely ropes between her pubic bone and her lower ribs. The Barbie doll was no longer soft and smooth and obedient.

How long would it take the nurse to fall fast asleep? Natasha checked her watch. Ten minutes had passed since the light had gone out in Katerina’s room, but a faint light still seeped out through the curtains in the room next door. It could be a night-light to calm a child who was afraid of the dark, but Natasha didn’t believe it. That’s where they were, the policemen.

She closed her hand around the knife in her jacket pocket again. Her fingers felt stiff and strange, as if they were no longer a part of her. But she could move them, and that was enough. Natasha measured the distance with her eyes. First five meters to the fence, and then about seventy meters across the snow-covered lawn. She had found pliers in the car’s trunk, and she hoped they would be sufficient to cut a hole in the heavy mesh. Otherwise she’d have to climb across, but that would make it harder when she brought Katerina back with her.

Katerina. Now only minutes separated them, minutes and seventy-five meters. Natasha got up.

Then she heard it. The sound of a motor someplace in the forest behind her where there weren’t supposed to be any cars. First a faint growl, then a shift to a lower gear and finally silence. There was no light to be seen through the trees. Only darkness and snow-laden branches. Natasha rubbed her nose with a numb red hand. Waited and listened. Then came the sound of car doors being opened and closed with careful, almost imperceptible clicks. A faint mumbling and the sound of heavy steps in the snow.

Silence again.

The desire to rush across the fence, shatter the window and drag Katerina with her out into the night was about to overpower her again. She was so close. Still, Natasha turned in the direction of the sound, got down on her knees and crept forward among the dark pines. Snow fell in cold showers from the branches onto her head and neck. Her unprotected hands hurt when they sank into the drifts, but she felt it only as a minor distraction. All her attention was focused on the sounds of the night, the whistling of the wind in the trees and the faint growl of trucks on the highway to Hillerød. How could the world make so much noise and at the same time be so still?

She crawled forward and through the next ruler-straight row of pines. The two narrow wheel tracks she herself had followed to the camp were only a few meters away now, and she could glimpse a faint light among the rippling black shadows of the trees.

A car was parked there, obscured by a storm of soft, whirling snowflakes. The headlights were off, but an interior light filled the car and created a faint orange-yellow aura against the black trees.

Natasha stopped in the shelter of a low, prickling pine and stuck her ice-cold hands inside her down jacket, confused. Someone had left the car and plowed a deep track among the trees to her right, but she couldn’t see the person who had done it or hear anything but the freezing wind, which blew through the forest. She turned toward the car again.

The driver’s seat was empty. But on the passenger seat sat a small, unmoving figure, staring straight ahead. The profile was sharply drawn, the nose aristocratically curved, and around the head was the silhouette of a huge, soft fur hat.

All at once the cold felt as if it came from inside as well as outside. It flowed from her chest through her abdomen and pooled in her arms and legs, making everything stiffen and hurt. Still she managed to move a little farther forward, close enough that she was afraid she would be seen if the woman in the car turned her head. Natasha knew the fear would kill her if it happened, but she had to be certain.

And then the woman did exactly that.

She turned her head slowly on a thin, wiry neck. Later Natasha remembered the movement as in slow motion: The huge gold earrings rocking slightly with the movement of the head, the bright red lips and the carefully powdered pale face. And finally the clear, pale blue eyes that stared into the dark without revealing any kind of emotion.

The Witch had found them again.

Natasha felt everything loosen in her body. She set off in the snow with a start like a hunted hare, stumbling through the trees without sensing the pine branches that whipped her in the face as she raced heedlessly back toward the camp and Katerina.

Seconds later a hollow bang sounded, and she knew she was too late.