Death of a Nightingale

Natasha had parked the car in the forest on the other side of the camp this time. The view of the children’s barrack wasn’t quite as good—the depot shacks were in the way—but there were still searching figures with lights and dogs in the woods around her former hideout. The snow had finally stopped falling. It covered the roadblocks and the cars and created an almost unbroken surface between the fence and the barracks, more orange than white because of the sodium vapor in the camp’s streetlights. She couldn’t see Katerina or Nina anywhere. Of course not. It had to be at least at least ten degrees below zero, and it was only 4:30 in the morning. She rubbed her tired eyes. It was useless. Even if she did see Katerina, what was she going to do? Freezing to death was about the only thing she could accomplish by remaining here, if someone didn’t spot her and catch her first. It was unwise, but she couldn’t help herself.

When she realized that the nurse had saved Katerina from the Witch, Natasha had felt a relief and a gratitude so powerful that the darkness around her spun dizzyingly as if she had drunk too many of Robbie’s whiskey shots. The relief was still there, but the gratitude was receding. On the other side of the fence and the sodium lights and the police barricades, that skinny Danish woman was lying with her arms around Natasha’s child, and although she knew that it was neither reasonable nor sensible, Natasha had never for a second been as jealous of the women in Pavel’s life as she was of Nina right now.

YOU’RE TOO CLINGY with that child, Pavel had said. He had imagined that they would go on vacation together, just the two of them, maybe to Krim, or why not abroad? Why not Berlin? He spoke the language; there was so much he could show her. Or Paris or London if she preferred.

Seventeen-year-old Natasha would have been beyond thrilled. This was precisely the world she had hoped would be waiting out there once she had escaped from Kurakhovo. Nineteen-year-old Natasha, however, would rather sit on the grass in the park and stop Katerina when she tried to put ants or ladybugs in her soft little mouth. Kiev was enough. The apartment, Pavel, Katerina—why would she need anything else? Occasionally she had agreed to hire a babysitter so they could go to a restaurant, but she would be restless the whole time, constantly remembering something she had to call and tell the young sitter. It was someone Pavel knew. He said she was studying medicine and wanted to earn a little cash. Natasha would have worried less, she thought, if there had been a more grandparent-like person available, but Pavel’s mother had died several years ago, and it was too far from Kurakhovo for her mother to come for a single evening.

Gradually he stopped asking. If that was how it was going to be, he said, then he wanted to hear no complaints if he went out on his own. That was when her jealousy had crept up on her. She sniffed him like a dog when he came home and tried to smell where he had been. She looked at his cell phone when he was in the bath and found a lot of unknown numbers and messages from people she had never heard of. Some of them were women, and she noted every female name. She turned out his pockets meticulously before she did the wash. And she couldn’t help asking, “Who is the Anna you call so often?”

He looked astonished. “Anna? How do you know that?”

“Who is she?” she repeated.

“My God,” he said and laughed. “Now you’re being silly. It’s my mother’s old nanny. She’s almost eighty, and she lives in Denmark. See for yourself.” He showed her the number and then had to explain, and she was embarrassed and really did feel silly and stupid because she hadn’t known that there was a difference between the numbers abroad and the ones in Ukraine. But how was she to know? She had never known anyone who lived abroad.

“Why did your mother have a nanny from Denmark?” she asked.

“It’s a bit complicated,” he said. “Everything was complicated then—Poles, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Galicia was one big mess, and nobody knew what would happen from one day to the next. Anna ended up in Copenhagen and got married there. But Mother never forgot Anna, and they kept on writing to each other for many years, even back when half their letters were snatched up by the censors. I’ve visited her several times, and, yes, I call her now and then to hear how she is doing. I care a great deal about her, in fact.”

Nina put her arms around his neck. “That’s okay,” she said. “You are allowed to care for almost eighty-year-old ladies. Just as long as you love me the most.”

“Silly thing,” he said. He pulled her close, exactly hard enough that she knew he wanted to make love to her, and a powerful surge of heat exploded somewhere under her belly button, shot downward and then spread up to her breasts and neck. She gasped, and he laughed and let his hands slide down to cup her buttocks. They never made it to the bed.

IT WAS BECAUSE of Anna that she had chosen Denmark later, when all the bad things happened. When Pavel was dead, and Katerina and she could no longer be in Ukraine. Denmark was the only other country that Natasha had been to—Natasha, Pavel and Katerina had visited together twice—and Anna the only person she knew abroad. And when her caseworker began to look worried, and Natasha was terrified that it was her turn to be deported … then it was Anna who had made sure she got to meet Michael.

She felt a stinging pain in the pit of her stomach at the thought. She took out a piece of chocolate and let it melt on her tongue. Then, slowly and with difficulty, she chewed a slice of the dark Danish rye bread that looked just like the Ukrainian bread she was used to on the outside but that tasted completely different. To think that she had been so stupid. To think that she had been so happy. So happy that she would be allowed stay in Bacon Land forever, where everyone lived high off the hog, and no one needed to be afraid of anything.

ABOUT HALF AN hour later, Nina emerged from the children’s barrack with Katerina. Natasha was out of the car before she knew it and had taken nine or ten steps toward the fence. Dangerous steps. A few more meters and she would have been completely visible from the camp.

She saw Nina speak with one of the officers who stood at the barricade around the barrack. The nurse pointed toward the clinic on the other side of the big, open grounds where the kids played soccer in the summer. The policeman lifted the striped plastic tape and let them through.

But Nina didn’t go in through the clinic’s front door. She and Katerina disappeared around the corner, then appeared again a bit later by the main entrance and the parking lot. The nurse took Katerina’s backpack and made her get into an ugly little yellow car.

Natasha began to run. Just then she didn’t care if all the policemen in the world saw her. She plowed a way through the high snow along the fence, but she was too far away. The little yellow car had started and was rolling out of the parking lot, slowly and carefully on the icy road, but still much too fast for Natasha to reach it.

Still she kept running, until her foot caught on a hidden tree root and she fell headfirst into the snow. And then she had to run all the way back again to the stolen Audi, which in her rush she couldn’t figure out how to start.

When she finally got the cold motor going and made her way back to the road, the yellow car was gone.

Natasha pulled over to the side and bent forward over the steering wheel. Acid burned in her stomach; she could barely breathe. In all the time that she had been parted from Katerina, she had always known where her daughter was. The little man on the Google map could find her. Natasha could plan the route and calculate the distance; she knew what direction she needed to go.

The Google man couldn’t find Nina.

Or wait. Could he?

“I know where you live,” she whispered. She could feel the knowledge loosening her chest so she could breathe again. She had been there once, long ago, when she and Michael had just gotten engaged and it looked as if everything would be safe and all right again. When both she and Nina believed that Natasha’s life could go on quietly in a house in Hørsholm, behind a hedge of flowering lilacs. In Bacon Land.

They had sat drinking coffee on Nina’s sofa in her messy apartment full of books, children’s clothing and rubber boots. Natasha wasn’t sure what the street was called, but she remembered the house—an old red-brick building on a narrow side street off the same wide boulevard where, months later, Natasha had bought the knife she meant to stab Michael with. Jagtvejen. That’s what it was called. The boulevard. Surely she would be able to find it. It wasn’t a route she had practiced, the way she had practiced the way to the Coal-House Camp, over and over again. But the Audi had a very high-end GPS.

It might even be better this way. After all, there were no fences and no guards around Nina’s house.