Death of a Nightingale

UKRAINE, 1935

“You’re like a dog. A little, stupid one.”

Olga looked at Oxana across the narrow table but didn’t have the energy to answer, just waited for the next attack. Oxana wasn’t really angry, she knew that. There was something teasing in the blue gaze. An invitation to a game of the kind they had played when they were a little younger in Kharkiv and even in Mykolayevka before everything went wrong. But Olga didn’t accept.

“A dog sticks its tail between its legs and hides because it doesn’t know any better. What’s your excuse?”

There was a smile but also a flicker of irritation in Oxana’s voice now. Olga still chose to ignore it. They were having oatmeal today. Water softened the oats so they somehow filled you up more than millet porridge and bread, and if you ate very slowly, it worked even better.

Olga emptied her bowl at a steady rate. She inhaled its smell and felt warmth spread through her whole body.

Mother also sat silent with her own portion, which wasn’t much bigger than those she had served the children. She gave them a little hunk of bread each. Olga broke hers in half, carefully cleaning the bowl with the soft side of the bread before stuffing it in her mouth. Afterward, they cleaned the pot together in the same way. Oxana poked at Olga’s hand, ruffled her hair and nipped playfully at her ear, but Olga pulled away instinctively. That was just the way it had become. She could no longer stand to be touched by Oxana.

She got up abruptly and began to comb Kolja’s hair for nits. Mother had had to cut it very short, because when Kolja was being looked after at the kolkhoz, he often played in the collective house, where whole families slept, cooked and ate on the floor. Lice and other bugs jumped on him even though Mother made sure to wash him every day and had somehow even acquired some bars of real soap. They managed, as Mother said. There were oats and cabbage and winter carrots, and the fist-sized bread ration that Mother brought home with her every day from the kolkhoz, a chunk for each. But hunger stayed with Olga like a toothache. When she got up, when she went to bed and now while she was rinsing the pots and checking Kolja’s soft short hair for lice.

Olga kissed him carefully at the nape of his neck and spun him around once. Mother had made a new coat for him from the red wool dress she had brought from Kharkiv. “Here I’ll never need such finery anyway,” she had said. “The hogs don’t care what I wear.”

“How nice you look,” said Olga and smiled. “A real little man.”

Kolja nodded. “I’m going to show it to Viktor and Elena and Marusja,” he said but then got a worried wrinkle in his forehead. “Should I be the father or the big brother when we play family?”

Olga considered for a moment. “You should be the father,” she said. “You’re a father who has just come back from Moscow after an important meeting with Uncle Stalin, and he has given you this fine coat as a thank-you for all that you have done for the Soviet Union.”

Kolja stood up straight and gave Oxana a serious look. “Like you, Oxana. I am going to build a better future with my own hands.”

Oxana was putting on her coat. She looked at Kolja and smiled crookedly, but she didn’t say anything. Oxana had become quieter lately. She was thinking of the cause, she claimed, but her spontaneous speeches about the better times that awaited them had become less frequent, and they warmed neither soul nor stomach the way they had done in the past.

Olga felt sore and tired to the bone, which really wasn’t very far if you thought about it. Her ribs were visible just beneath the skin, and her hipbones jutted out so far that it really hurt when she knocked into a table or a doorframe. And she did that often. Hunger made them all clumsy, and Kolja fretful and whiny, but they were still alive while others were dead—Father and Grandfather and Jana’s mother too, who had succumbed to tuberculosis just a month ago. Olga had watched from the window when she was sung out of the Petrenko house. Jana walked behind the funeral procession with her shoulders pulled all the way up to her ears, scratching her hair once in a while. She and Olga no longer spoke.

Mother had tied on both shawl and kerchief and reached for Kolja with an impatient gesture. “We have to go now, Kolja,” she said in a thin voice. “Otherwise Mama Hog will get impatient.”

Mama Hog, the largest of the breeding sows, was Kolja’s favorite, and for her sake he was usually willing to hurry, but today he pulled himself free of Mother’s hand and stuck out his lower lip. “I have to bring my rifle.”

Olga looked around and caught sight of the stick that he had whittled smooth and nice and free of bark, and which had now been designated a weapon in the Red Army. She handed it to Kolja, who stashed it under his coat with a satisfied expression.

“Now we’ll go,” he said.

“Yes, now we’ll go.”

Mother and Kolja opened the door, walked out to the road and turned in the direction of the kolkhoz. Oxana remained in the doorway, looking at Olga.

“Come with me,” she then said. “It will be all right. They won’t dare to do anything.”

Olga shrugged, not meeting Oxana’s eyes. They had had this conversation before, and she knew what Oxana was going to say. Olga ought to go to school both for her own sake and for Uncle Stalin. She and all other children were the future of the nation. Oxana had reported the beating to the village soviet, and no one would dare to attack them again. That’s what Oxana would say, but it would be lies, most of it, and even Oxana knew it.

Why else would Oxana go to so much trouble to get to the school without being seen? Olga knew which way she went. Instead of taking the long main street through the village, she snuck out through the orchard and followed the narrow path to the river. From there you could walk among the closely spaced birch trees to the back of the cooperative store without anyone seeing you unless they were really close. If you went through the gap between the wagon maker’s shop and one of the village’s deserted houses, you could reach the school without meeting a living soul.

But Olga wasn’t having any of it.

After what happened with Vitja and Pjotr, she left the house only reluctantly, and when she did, it was mostly to collect water or logs or to stop by the Arsenovs. They subscribed to the local newspaper for Kharkiva Oblast and let Mother read it in return for helping them with their washing.

Oxana thought Olga was scared, but it wasn’t just that. It was an unclear sensation of shame, even though Olga didn’t think she had done anything wrong. It was the thought that she had been lying there in that frozen sewage ditch in the middle of the main street, her cheek pressed against the grubby ice and the sound of the boys’ excited and breathless laughter in her ears. And as for Uncle Stalin—Olga had begun to grimace in her head every time he came up—as for good old Uncle Stalin, Oxana could take him and stick him up the ass of a cow, if she could find one that was big enough.

She didn’t want to go to school, where Jana would be staring at her and Sergej would stick his oily face close to hers to whisper ugly words. And she didn’t want to walk beside Oxana. Ever again.

OXANA FINALLY LEFT. Olga closed the door behind her and was alone.

That was okay. Better than going to school, at least, but she had to keep herself constantly occupied in order not to think too much. Today she was going to put their blankets out on the veranda. It was still cold, and with a bit of luck, the frost would kill some of the lice.

Olga took the birch broom and swept the floor as best she could, but the work quickly made her dizzy and short of breath, and in spite of the heat from the brick oven, she felt the raw cold through her underwear, dress and shawl.

She lay down on the oven shelf and covered herself with the heavy blankets and goat hides. The warmth from the heated bricks immediately made her doze off and dream uneasy dreams. Father was tied to a pole with his hands behind his back, and next to him stood the widow Svetlova dressed in a zobel fur and with her great, round stomach exposed and vulnerable to the gun barrels that pointed at them both.

Olga tried to wrest herself free from the dream, but the pictures kept coming in a swiftly flowing stream no matter how hard she squeezed her eyes shut. And then the pole was suddenly gone, and she was back in their own house and Father was outside hammering on the door with huge, heavy fists and screaming that she was to let him in.

She was still dreaming. It had to be a dream. But the insane hammering continued.

“Where is she? Where is your devil of a sister?”

I’m not going to open up, she thought. Why can’t they all just leave us alone? The living and the dead.