Death of a Nightingale

UKRAINE, 1934

Olga kicked her way through the snow to the stable, where the cow lay waiting patiently in the dark. That was something cows were good at. Olga sometimes tried to imagine what it was like to be a cow and lie there on the cold earthen floor and wait for someone to appear with water and hay and potato peels and let light into the stable and shovel shit from the gutter and whatever else a cow needed to stay alive. Did Zorya even know that summer would return? And was she ever afraid of being forgotten?

If she was, she hid it well. Her large, glassy eyes rested calmly on Olga in the gloom. She lay on her side with the clumsy yellowish hooves pulled up against her stomach, which appeared unnaturally large and swollen in comparison to her flabby, shrunken udders.

Olga grabbed an armful of hay and loosened it carefully, trying not to get pricked by the many thistles. Then she threw it in front of the cow, who stuck her long blue tongue all the way out and pulled the hay toward her without getting up.

Frost covered the walls and straw like a fragile white spiderweb, and the water in the trough was frozen, but not so hard Olga couldn’t make a hole in the ice with Grandfather’s sickle for Zorya to drink from. Then she scraped the cow shit to the side and cautiously poked the cow to see if she wanted to get up. She didn’t. Milk for Kolja would have to wait. If the cow stood up, Olga would also find some fresh pine boughs for her to lie on, because even though she had her usual thick winter coat, you could see her bones like thick branches under the skin. If the cow wasn’t lying on something soft, those bones would gnaw through flesh and skin, and she would get sores and die.

Mother didn’t take care of the cow.

She took care of the pigs in the kolkhoz and had the responsibility for all the squealing, hunchbacked beasts in Stable Number Two. Every morning she fought her way down there through the drifts to fatten up the swine. And that was fine with her. Or so she said. She might not be as strong as she used to be, but she was still a damn sight better than those two sluts from the Caucasus who were supposedly in charge of Stable Number One, but who, according to Mother, drank vodka and whored worse than the swine. Back when Father was still living with them, Mother wouldn’t have said such things, but her speech had become coarse and rude now, especially when she talked about younger women.

“They can fuck, but I can work,” she said, her laugh brief and hard, not at all like the way she used to laugh when they still lived in Kharkiv.

Olga stroked the broad, greasy bridge of the cow’s nose and thought that it would have been nice to sit here with someone. Jana. But the mere thought of Jana gave her a clenching sensation in her stomach.

After Oxana’s pioneer meeting, a number of children in the school fawned over her in a dog-like manner. Nadia and Vladimir and little Veronica, who was really a niemcy, an ethnic German, and had been forcibly relocated here from Galicia, but who still loved Comrade Semienova and the Party and all that meant in terms of khaki-colored uniform shirts and red banners. Her eyes were glued to Oxana in the schoolroom, and when Olga talked about the counterrevolutionary cells in the village that had to be crushed, little Veronica opened her tiny bright red mouth and sighed with devotion.

But not everyone looked at Oxana and Olga with such adoration. Some eyes were lowered when they turned around in the schoolroom. Whispering would suddenly cease when they walked by and later start up again behind their backs. Olga knew what they were whispering, even though no one had said it to her face. She had listened and picked it up piece by piece. They were whispering about Oxana and Fedir. They said that Fedir had been in love with Oxana, and that Oxana had gone for long walks with him down by the frozen stream. She had lured him into telling her about the wheat under the stable floor, and afterward she had reported it to the chief of the GPU in Sorokivka.

Everything had gotten worse after the letter arrived from the Marchenko family. Fedir’s sister, the little girl with the hare-like scream, had never made it to their destination, which was so far north that you had to travel by train for a full fourteen days. She had stopped screaming on their third day in the cattle car. They had left her someplace along the tracks between Kharkiv and Novokuznetsk. No one knew exactly where.

Jana was one of the whisperers now. Fedir was her cousin, and even though Jana had made fun of him when he still sat in the back of the class, his disappearance had broken something between Jana and Olga, something that couldn’t be put back together again.

That was the way things were, and there was nothing Olga could do about it.

She was not responsible for Fedir’s banishment, but she was tied to Oxana by blood, just as Jana was tied to Fedir. Therefore they had to be enemies now, and it was a war that Jana threw herself into with a bloody rage.

Jana said that Olga was ugly and had body lice, and that she didn’t want to sit next to her in school. Jana also said that she was just as dirty as her swine of a mother. Jana told the others in school how their old house sparkled now that Svetlova had taken over the housekeeping and that Svetlova was expecting a child who would soon replace Olga, Oxana and Kolja.

Outside the cow barn, Grandfather was making his way to the woodshed, coughing. Olga stood with her hand on the cow’s neck and listened to the sound of the axe splitting wet birch wood until it hit the chopping block with a faint echo in the ice-cold air.

Then came the roar.

He was calling Mother, Olga could hear, and afterward he also called Grandmother, even though she had been dead for several years now. Olga felt a gust of terror blow through her. She wrenched open the door and raced across the yard to the woodshed.

Grandfather lay with the axe in his shin, cursing and shouting for vodka. Olga and Oxana had to hold down both him and his leg while Mother pulled the axe free from the bone. There was blood everywhere. Even the bone bled, it seemed to Olga, and she knew bones couldn’t bleed.

Mother sent Oxana off to get the barber, telling her to run as fast as she could. Olga got rags and blankets, and Mother tore a wide strip of linen from a sack and made a tourniquet right above the cut. She used the axe handle to tighten it and turned it around and around even though Grandfather screamed like an animal going to slaughter and cursed her to hell and back again.

“Would you rather die?” Mother just said when he stopped screaming for a moment out of sheer exhaustion.

Finally Oxana returned with the barber. He tied a piece of bluish-white sheep gut around the biggest of the pumping arteries and sewed the tear together with needle and thread. Only then could they help each carry Grandfather into the house.

Even after the barber was done, Grandfather didn’t stop bleeding. Mother sat next to him and pressed one rag after another against the cut, her grip hard and frantic. Grandfather had drunk so much vodka that he could no longer speak, and spit and drool trickled from the corner of his mouth into his beard. There was a wet rattle in his chest. Olga wasn’t sure if she was more afraid of him dying or of him waking up again. She was feeling sick and couldn’t stop shaking, but Oxana was pale and calm and looked as if she were thinking of something else completely.

“If he dies, he is no good to us,” she said gravely to Olga. “And even if he lives, he is no good to us. It is winter, and we have no man in the house.”

Olga looked over at Grandfather. The darkness in the room was oppressive, and the glow from the oven illuminated it only enough that she could see the growing pile of soaked black rags on the floor next to him.

Olga knew that she shouldn’t be thinking of herself, but still. Grandfather did more than just administer hard, unexpected slaps to the face and neck. Grandfather chopped wood and laid traps in the woods. The skins he sold were their only source of cash and goods like meat and sugar and tea and salt and petroleum; how would they do without?

The barber had cost rubles, Olga knew. Rubles and bread. And today there were no rations from the kolkhoz’s communal kitchen because Mother had stayed home and left the pigs to the Caucasian whores.

LATER, WHEN GRANDFATHER was fast asleep, and dusk had fallen outside, Father suddenly appeared in the doorway.

Olga’s heart gave a little jump for joy in the middle of all the sadness and nastiness. Father must have heard about the accident and had come to … to take Mother back. Now that he knew she was completely helpless in the world, he had realized what a big mistake he had made. The widow and the baby had to go, of course, but that would be okay. The baby would be small and could live in a smaller house. And in any case, that was Svetlova’s problem, not theirs.

Father carefully stomped the snow off his boots before he stepped inside. His broad shoulders filled the whole room, thought Olga.

“Tatko!”

Without thinking she rushed over and threw her arms around him. She took in the familiar smell of sawdust and pine sap and noticed that it was now spiced with a very faint new scent of chamomile, which probably came from Svetlova’s body. She didn’t care. She burrowed her face into his open coat and pressed her nose and cheek against his woolen shirtfront.

He pushed her away.

His eyes were swimming a little, and Olga realized that nothing was exactly as it should be. He had been drinking, she could see, and behind him Oxana now stomped into the room and shot Olga a cranky look.

“You wanted to speak with me?” Father said to Mother, his expression foreign and hostile.

Mother got up on uncertain legs, nodding to Father as she smoothed her hair. Olga could see that she was attempting to hide the gaping holes in her rows of teeth when she spoke. “We need money, Andreij. Or at least some of your rations from the kolkhoz.”

“Sell something,” said Father. “The old man still has a cow, and that’s more than most people. That it was allowed to survive last winter was a miracle in itself. Fat and pregnant as it was. If I were you, I’d eat it now before it is collected for the kolkhoz. That’s the best advice I can give you.”

Mother lowered her head but went on. “But your children,” she said. “Will you let them starve because of this new bastard of yours? What kind of man are you?”

Grandfather stirred uneasily in the gloom behind her. He made a drawn-out, whimpering noise that sounded more like an animal than a human. He lay with his eyes closed, his breathing labored.

Father had narrowed his eyes to slits, and the rage and vodka made his face ruddy in the light from the oven. Olga was afraid now. It seemed like an eternity since he had sat on the veranda outside the house in Kharkiv and called Olga his “most highborn princess” and Mother “the most beautiful flower in the field.”

Now he was a person she didn’t know at all, and she realized that there was also more than one truth about her father. The man who loves and smiles one day can hate the next. Turn your back for a moment, and feelings will change and flow in new directions.

“Tatko,” she whispered and grabbed hold of his hand. But he didn’t notice her.

“I have been man enough for you,” he hissed. “Now I am man for another woman, and I cannot support two families. It’s hard enough with one.”

Mother’s face distorted in a terrible grimace. “You’re lying,” she said. “I know how much you have put aside over time. Jewelry from your mother. My silk shawls from town and my sewing machine. At least give me those things, Andreij, so I can take care of your children.”

Father stepped forward and raised his hand. Even though he lowered it without striking, Olga knew that Jana had been right. He had chosen the widow and the new child, and she and Kolja and Oxana were nothing to him.

WHEN HE HAD left, they sat for a long time in the silent gloom. Then Oxana finally got up and began to get ready to go out again.

“Where are you going?” Mother’s voice was flat and low, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a grave.

“To school,” said Oxana. “There’s something I have to discuss with Comrade Semienova.”