Death of a Nightingale

UKRAINE, 1935

No one was allowed to see the dead.

Not even Mother, although she screamed and cried herself hoarse in front of the village soviet’s office. Comrade Semienova put her arm around Mother’s shoulders and cried too, but she was still the one who held Mother back and prevented her from storming into the building where the GPUs were busy still. She had to wait until they were done examining the bodies, said Semienova. Nothing was more important right now than finding out what exactly had happened.

Olga stood behind her mother and could not cry, even though a hard, sharp pain had lodged itself just below her breastbone, like it sometimes did when something heavy hit you in the stomach. She couldn’t cry, and she could barely breathe.

They had killed Oxana. That was what Comrade Semienova had told them. Down by the stream, with knives. The attack had been so violent that the blood had sprayed out over the snow and the naked birch branches in an arc several meters wide. That last detail Olga knew from Leda and Jegor, who had gone out with Comrade Semienova to look for Oxana. The first thing they had seen was little Kolja lying on the ground, staring emptily at the sky. His toy rifle was nowhere to be seen. Olga didn’t know why she asked about it at all, but for some reason it felt important. As if the rifle could have made a difference. But he didn’t have anything in his hand, said Leda, and he was dead, she could see that at once because his throat gaped like a broad red extra mouth under his chin.

Oxana had been lying a little farther off.

I want to die too, thought Olga. I want to die and lie together with little Kolja and even with Oxana, because now they no longer feel anything, while I hurt everywhere.

But she didn’t die, and she couldn’t think of anything she might do right now to make death happen. She could only stand there behind Mother and listen to her hoarse screams and look at Comrade Semienova, who had red, swollen eyes. Today she wasn’t showing her dimples or smoking cigarettes.

During the night Mother finally stopped screaming, which was both a relief and a source of new fear, because what if she died of sorrow? Olga knew it was possible, because her own soul felt like it was twisting inside her and attempting to escape her body. Olga had heard that there was no greater sorrow than the one a mother feels when her child dies. And Mother had lost two children at once, and maybe that was more than heart and lungs and intestines and all the other things inside the body could endure.

Olga curled up, listening for Mother’s breath in the darkness. She finally caught the sound, the kind of small, hiccupping gasps that small children sometimes made when they had cried deeply and for a long time. It was impossible to tell if Mother was sleeping or if she was awake. But at least she wasn’t dead. Not yet.

Oxana would never sing again, and Kolja was done playing family and fighting great battles for the Red Army. Now he lay dead in the headquarters of the GPU. Olga suddenly wondered if all the lice on his head would follow him into the ground. The thought nauseated her, but she couldn’t stop herself. Pictures kept popping into her mind, pictures of Kolja with his throat cut and lice that crawled slowly across his cold, pale scalp; of Oxana’s sparklingly happy blue eyes that day when she had learned that she would sing at the Pioneer meeting in Kharkiv.

“You shouldn’t have gone, Oxana,” Olga whispered into the mattress. “I told you not to go.”