Death of a Nightingale

There was blood on the knife. The nurse’s blood. Natasha had cut her neck. Not as badly as she had done with Michael, nowhere near, but worse than she had meant to. Natasha felt a deep shiver spread from her core.

Blood.

Nina hadn’t screamed, hadn’t flailed her arms as Michael had done. She lay still in the snow, looking up at Natasha. Her voice was calm, as if it were a normal conversation and Natasha had just asked her a completely ordinary question.

“It has to be secret, or it’s not safe.”

Danes didn’t lie as much as Ukrainians did. It was as if they believed the truth made them better human beings. A Dane would feel the need to tell a terminally ill patient the entire truth about the cancer that would choke him in the end. For his own good, of course. “I have to be honest,” a Dane would say, and afterward he would be relieved, and the one who had received the truth would be crushed. Natasha preferred a considerate lie any day, but she hadn’t encountered many of those either in or outside the Coal-House Camp.

Was the nurse lying now? Natasha narrowed her eyes, looking down at the sprawling figure she was straddling.

It has to be secret, or it’s not safe.

“Safe,” she said thoughtfully, trying to understand the word. Safe was to be in a place of safety, a place where no one could harm you. Where the Witch couldn’t reach you. But the price was that it was secret, and no one could know where you were.

That was a calculation she understood completely. It was in her bones. It had been in the pounding, chilly pain in her crotch and abdomen, the smell of sweat and semen, the near-throttling pressure against her throat and in the silence that could not be broken, no matter what form his anger took. With Michael, that had been the price of safety. She had paid it for Katerina’s sake.

You can endure anything, she had told herself, as long as Katerina is safe.

Could she also endure the thought that Katerina would be safe in a place where Natasha couldn’t reach her? Could she stand it if safety meant she could never touch her daughter or see her again, not even on wrenchingly brief prison visits?

Some women gave their children up for adoption so they would have a better life. Natasha would rather die.

Nina was saying something. Natasha didn’t catch it all, she just heard the repetition of the word “safe.”

The crushing, unacceptable truth was penetrating her, jerk by jerk, even though she didn’t want it inside her. The nurse didn’t know anything—even bleeding, even with the knife against her throat, she couldn’t tell Natasha anything.

With a sharp wrench of translucent pain, the last connection to Katerina was severed. The trail of bread crumbs through the forest was gone; the birds had eaten it. There was no longer a way home.

A HOLE IN time, a sudden shift.

She was in the car. She was driving the car. Headlights approached her in pairs. The snow was drifting across the windshield. She had no idea where she was, didn’t remember how she had gotten there. The knife lay on the seat next to her, still with blood on the tip. Inside her there was no longer a goal, no longer any direction or any meaning at all. The temptation to head for a pair of the lights moving toward her was overwhelming.

Suicides did not go to Heaven.

“Don’t fill the child’s head with that superstitious foolishness,” Pavel had said. “There is no Heaven.”

It was the day that Natasha’s grandmother was being buried. September, but still so warm that the air shimmered above the asphalt outside the airport in Donetsk.

“Why not?” asked Natasha. “You don’t know what happens when we die either.”

“I know that there won’t be any angel choirs and harp music for me,” he said.

Katerina had been five. She listened when the grown-ups talked. Not always obviously, but with a silent awareness that made it seem as if she was eavesdropping even when she sat right next to you, as now, in the back of the taxi.

“So Daddy won’t go to Heaven?” she whispered to Natasha.

Pavel heard it even though he was helping the taxi driver put the bags in the trunk. He also saw the silent pleading in Natasha’s eyes.

“Sweetie pie,” he said and slid into the seat from the other side. “That’s a long time from now. We don’t need to think about it.”

“But Great-Grandmother is dead,” said Katerina. “Where is she going if there is no Heaven?”

It wasn’t as if Katerina had seen her great-grandmother all that often. Still, the question was serious, as was Katerina’s worried gaze.

“Are you sad that she is dead?” asked Pavel.

Katerina considered. “She made good poppy seed cakes,” she said.

Pavel smiled. “Good,” he said. “Then we agree that there is a Heaven and that Great-Grandmother is there now. She has just baked a poppy seed cake and made us tea, and we can visit her when we sleep so she doesn’t get too lonely. I’ll just have to try and see if I can stand the harping.”

Katerina accepted this and looked relieved. Death without lifelines was hard for a five-year-old to take on board, and Natasha was happy that Pavel had been as accommodating as he had and that Katerina couldn’t see the irony in his eyes.

Twelve months later Pavel was dead. And for some reason Natasha had a hard time imagining that he sat next to God looking down at them. He no longer took care of them; in fact, he never had. It had just seemed that way until the day the Witch arrived.

SUDDENLY NATASHA KNEW what she needed to do. The world fell into place around her, and there was meaning and order again. She could protect Katerina, even though she no longer knew where Katerina was. She could make sure that safe really meant safe.

Once she had wondered at the fact that murderers could get into Heaven when people who committed suicide couldn’t. Wasn’t it worse to kill someone else? Now she was glad that was the way it was. She listened, but Anna-in-her-head apparently had no opinion of her new plan. Still Natasha felt calm, cold and determined. If Katerina really was to be safe, there was only one thing to do.

The Witch had to die.