Death of a Nightingale

They came for Father in the beginning of December, and he didn’t have time to say goodbye to anyone besides Vladimir Petrenko and the widow.

It was Jana who was able to report it in school, and maybe she did feel a little sorry for Olga, after all, because she let Olga sit next to her on the steps while the children gathered around her during the break.

“He was yelling and screaming all the way down to the crossroads,” said Jana. “And Svetlova, big as a house, came waddling after on bare feet and tried to hit one of the GPUs with a log. Like this.”

Jana got up and ran with heavy, spread legs over the lumpy, frost-covered ground, screaming, “Oh, oh,” holding her stomach with one hand and swinging an imaginary piece of firewood in the other. The others laughed, and Jana happily repeated the performance a few times before she tired of the applause and stopped, cheeks glowing and feet apart. Her breath emerged in a white cloud from her mouth.

“Did they hit him?”

Olga thought Jegor looked almost eager. Her stomach had tied itself into a hard knot, and the air she breathed into her lungs was so cold, it seemed to make her chest freeze solid.

Jana didn’t answer right away but remained standing, scratching her hair thoughtfully. She had lice, Olga observed. Jana’s mother had had a fever and a cough for the last two weeks and had not had the strength to comb Jana and her little sister with the lice comb the way she usually did. Even at this distance Olga could see the big, fat creatures crawling around in Jana’s pale hair and was secretly pleased. Maybe that would teach her to lie about Olga’s body lice. But it still hurt all the way down into the pit of her stomach. In the old days, she would have offered to crack the lice for Jana during recess, but now Jana would just have to crack them herself, if she could catch them.

“I think they did hit him once with the rifle,” said Jana then. “Across the back of the neck. Afterward, he did what they told him to, even though he kept screaming.”

“Too bad.”

The boys had hoped for more, Olga could see. They had played Capitalists and Communists all recess long, and the capitalists had been beaten as usual. It was clear, they said, that Andreij should have been beaten much more severely for his crimes. As head of the kolkhoz, he had not only protected the kulaks, who should have been deported long ago, he had also ignored several thefts from the state’s grain stores, even though the thieves had been caught. Those kinds of thefts could be punished with deportation or even death, but Andreij had openly flouted the law and neglected to report the episode to the GPU. He had even accepted a young mother who had been classified as a Former Human Being into the collective farm and had fed her kulak children through all of last winter.

In his house he had hidden several things that made him a class enemy. The GPUs had dragged both Mother’s sewing machine and a silver candelabra from the house, and the widow Svetlova had brazenly worn a zobel fur and had owned two big copper pots. Even one would have been a conspicuous luxury; two copper pots was a clear crime against the people, who had toiled in the mines to bring up precious metal for the industry.

The boys then tried to guess where Andreij would spend his time in deportation. Obdorsk, or Beresovo, or maybe Samarovo. The farther north it was, the worse it would be. People got gangrene and lost arms and legs in the Siberian cold, and that was true both for those who ended up in a prison camp and for the more fortunate ones who were deported but allowed to live as free men. Letters from Siberia were full of horrors.

For the widow, it was a different matter, or so Jegor claimed. True, she had been forced to depart in woolen socks and without either zobel fur or overcoat, thrown out on her ass and ordered to find a place to live outside the village. She had a bad record now, but she probably had an old mother someplace with whom she could seek shelter from the winter cold for her unborn child.

Olga sat stock-still, picking at her felt boots and trying not to think the incomprehensible. Her father wasn’t a class enemy, and she didn’t understand how it had come to be that he was one anyway. It wasn’t easy either, to figure out why some of those who had been deported were to be pitied while others apparently were getting what they deserved. Every day offered new truths that grated against one another inside her head, as painfully as sharp stones under one’s feet. The others seemed to have no problem understanding. Self-confident Jana, Jegor and Leda and Oxana, yes, even Sergej, that little shit, knew when you were supposed to smile proudly and when you had to duck your head in shame. Knew which truths you should grab on to and which ones you should let go.

Old truth: Olga’s father is Andreij Trofimenko, a trusted man in the village, a loving father and a loyal husband.

New truth: Olga’s father is Andreij Trofimenko, class enemy and traitor, deportee and Former Human Being, a lousy father and deceitful husband.

Unwelcome pictures began to swim past her inner eye, even though she bit herself hard in the cheek and tried to think about the soy candy from Petrograd that Comrade Semienova had offered Oxana and her last week.

Her father living in a hole in the ground like the ones the Former Human Beings dug among the birch trees up in the hills. His hands that had split the year’s first melon two summers ago in the garden of their little townhouse … in her imagination, those same hands were now black and stinking with gangrene, even as he held the sparkling red fruit between his fingers.

“Eat, my lovely,” said Father and handed the melon to her while he smiled with a toothless mouth. His nose was as black as his fingers, and he smelled of rotting flesh and vodka.

“I feel sorry for the baby,” Veronica said and shook her head sadly. In the battle against the kulaks and the capitalists, she had had a passionate skirmish with Sergej and had her kerchief pulled down over her shoulders. “That a mother would do that to her child.”

“Save your pity,” drawled Jegor. “The brat isn’t even born yet, and maybe Svetlova still has time to go to a doctor in Kharkiv, and that’s the end of that, and nothing will ever hurt it again.”

“Shut up.”

Olga knew she should keep her mouth shut, but the words shot out. Her voice broke, sounding stupid and babyish. She wished Oxana was here, but Oxana was in the kolkhoz, arranging yet another political meeting, and now Jana looked at her with a mixture of pity and glee.

“What’s wrong? I thought you didn’t like Svetlova.”

Olga shrugged, got up and quickly brushed off her dress. Her fingers were red and numb because she had left her mittens in the schoolroom, and she had forgotten to hide her hands in her coat sleeves. Right now she couldn’t feel them, but when she went inside, her fingers would hurt, and the skin would split and itch. To her amazement, Jana brought her face so close to Olga’s that their foreheads almost touched, and Olga had time to think that now she would definitely get lice.

“You better watch out for yourself,” whispered Jana. “Your father may be a class enemy, Olga, but your traitor sister has blood on her hands now. Her own family’s blood. If I were you, I would watch my back around her.”