Death of a Nightingale

14:11. exactly a minute had passed since she last checked. Not good.

The sky was so thunderously grey that it might as well have been evening. Nina knew that she checked her watch more frequently on days when the sun didn’t give her a natural sense of the time, but this was more than that. She pulled over to the side of the road, and only then did she realize that she had subconsciously been headed for Fejøgade.

Fuck.

“You don’t live there anymore,” she told herself. She said it out loud because she wanted her subconscious to listen this time. Damn it. If Morten saw her, he would probably think she was stalking them. Like one of those rejected ex-husbands who went home and polished their army reserve rifle and put on their best clothes before blasting off the backs of their skulls. That is, if they didn’t take out their whole family first. Contemptible shitheads.

She carefully placed her hands on the steering wheel again. 14:11. Fuck.

“I just want to take care of them.”

And they said that too, the men with the army reserve rifles. I just wanted to take care of them. When they shot the children, it wasn’t to harm them. Shitheads.

14:12.

But the thought that Natasha had been there. At her home. Well, okay, at Morten’s and the children’s home.

14:12. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I just want to take care of them.

“Are you having a nervous breakdown?” she asked out loud in English.

Why she was speaking English to herself she didn’t know. And then she actually did know. English was the language of crisis. In Dadaab and elsewhere. And flying conditions were lousy.

“Nina, damn it.”

She breathed very consciously now. Long, deep breaths. “Allll the way down to the pit of your stomach,” as an instructor had once said. Panic-reducing big breaths.

The black anxiety inside her paid no attention. Nina didn’t get it. Natasha wasn’t more dangerous than the Finnish psychopath who had kidnapped Ida last year. And in that situation she had been able to think and act; she had done what was necessary for Ida to be rescued. Natasha was no more dangerous. Definitely not. Natasha was just a poor Ukrainian girl who had landed in some bad shit.

A poor Ukrainian mother, Nina reminded herself. And you have taken her child.

14:13.

She knew that it wasn’t always the obvious crises that made people crack. An Iranian man who had survived multiple arrests, torture and threats without breaking down had completely lost it and had tried to smash a radiator one evening in the Coal-House Camp’s recreation room. Afterward he explained, crying and incoherent, that it was because the noise from a defective valve reminded him of machine-gun fire.

But you haven’t been tortured, she reminded herself. So how about turning down the drama a notch or two?

Outside on Jagtvejen traffic glided by in its lazy Sunday rhythm. A mother passed her with two carnival-costumed children, one in a stroller, the other lagging a few feet behind on tired cat paws.

For the rest of the school carnival, Nina had barely been able to keep it together. She had smiled and clapped for Anton’s sake. He had been so caught up in the barrel-smashing and apple-bobbing and all the other hullaballoo that he hadn’t noticed anything. But Ida had immediately spotted that something was wrong.

“What have you done now?” she asked, lashing out at Nina with all the old hostility that had seemed to be receding.

“Ida!” said Morten. “Speak nicely to your mother.”

Nina felt a surge of wobbly and yet more destabilizing gratitude to him for defending her, even if the defense did sound a bit tired and hollow because he basically agreed with Ida. As soon as the bottom had fallen out of Anton’s barrel, releasing oranges in all directions, she had kissed Super Mario on his cap and raced out the door.

Would you take my child, Natasha?

And Natasha answered her, a whispering voice somewhere inside: Why not? You took mine.

“No,” Nina protested. “You asked me to take care of her. That’s what I’ve done. Just that.” But it was a lie, a big, fat lie. When the gates to Fejøgade had been shut in her face, banishing her from what right now seemed a perfect Eden, though it hadn’t been so at the time … in that moment of despair and rejection, it had been Rina she had clung to. There had been so many nights when she had slept next to Rina ostensibly “to keep an eye on that asthma,” but really because her own bed in the new-divorcée apartment had been unbearably lonely and impossible to sleep in.

So no, she couldn’t go to Fejøgade. But the thought of returning to Søren’s tidy suburban home made her panic accelerate. Magnus was there, she thought. Magnus would have to manage a little longer. He had a caring but more professional relationship to Rina.

She could go get the asthma medicine. Yes, that’s what she would do. They had already used more than they should have, and they couldn’t afford to run out. The drive back and forth would consume over an hour of unruly, fundamentally un-checkable time, and by then she might have calmed down a bit.

She started the engine again and headed for the Coal-House Camp. The time was 14:19.