Death of a Nightingale

Natasha was pretty sure that she was going to die.

Not because the man next to her had said anything particular to her or had been deliberately threatening. It was more the way that the woman in the backseat and he spoke to each other—so quiet and relaxed, as if Natasha had already been taken care of and never would be a threat again.

“Did you speak to Nikolaij?” asked the man.

“No. No, I’ll wait to call until we get home again. He thinks I’m in Odessa. I couldn’t say …”

“No, I guess you couldn’t.” The man’s tone had become dry and distant.

“Jurij, you know it’s different with him. He doesn’t understand these things.”

“I know. Forget it, Mamo. It’ll work out. We can leave tonight if you want. Then we’ll be home by Tuesday morning at the latest. I need some proper food; I’m about to throw up from all the hot dog buns.” He laughed a brief, explosive laugh and slammed one hand flat against the steering wheel.

Even though he was probably the one who would be in charge of the actual execution, it was the old woman who made the hairs at the back of Natasha’s neck stand up. She made Natasha intensely uncomfortable, and Natasha couldn’t help turning her head every other second so she could at least see her out of the corner of her eye. The Witch noticed and sent her a brief, unreadable look before turning her head toward the side window.

“What are we looking for, Jurij?” she asked. Passing headlights and the white overhead flicker of the streetlamps illuminated her narrow face and made deep black shadows of the furrows around her mouth and eyes.

He shrugged. “A good place,” he said.

Natasha sank a little deeper into the seat. The blood kept collecting in her mouth, and she was tired of swallowing it. She considered how he might react if she spat it out, either on the bottom of the car or in a dramatic red splatter on the side window. She caught sight of herself in the side-view mirror, her ghostlike reflection flashing back at her each time they passed another streetlight. Her face looked battered and distorted. One of her eyes had almost disappeared in a swelling that seemed to grow with every glimpse. Strands of hair had come loose from her ponytail and were matted against her forehead, nose and swollen eyelid, but she was unable to push them aside or scrub away the bloody tracks under her nose. The man, Jurij, had bound her hands behind her back with thin plastic strips of the kind normally used to organize cables or attach plastic toys to brightly colored cardboard backgrounds.

Like a Barbie in a cardboard box, she thought. The face in the mirror, which was no longer really hers, crumpled and emitted an odd, sobbing snort, neither laughing nor crying. Little flecks of blood hit the man’s hand on the gearshift. He shot her an irritated look, reached across her and searched for something in the glove compartment. Finally he found a pack of wet wipes and wiped his hands, cursing softly, before once more turning his full attention to the road.

The traffic abruptly slowed down and then almost stopped. Up ahead Natasha could see blinking blue lights and men in yellow reflective vests. Some of them read POLICE.

She considered whether there was anything she could do. The nice Danish policemen probably wouldn’t be quite as nice now that she had attacked one of their own, but they wouldn’t kill her and bury her in “a good place.” But it was hopeless. She could neither wave nor knock on the window, at least not unless she began pounding her head against it. Jurij glanced at her and pulled aside his overcoat in a relaxed way so she could see the butt of a black pistol.

“First I’ll shoot you,” he said. “Then I’ll shoot them if necessary. But first you.”

She sat passive, her head bowed, while they passed the police car and the tow truck that was in the process of pulling two cars apart.

WHEN THE POLICE came to say that Pavel was dead, she hadn’t been surprised. That is what happens when you don’t believe in the reality of wolves, she thought. Meanwhile, her body registered an inner breakdown, as if her spine had finally succumbed to some long-term pressure and collapsed. Her legs became numb, and she could no longer feel her face. Her hearing came and went, and she had to ask the policeman to repeat the message several times to catch it all. In a car. At Lake Didorovka. What had he been doing there?

“Did he come off the road?” she asked, because maybe there was still a chance to normalize his death into the comprehensible everyday universe. But no. Of course not. It was homicide. A “suspicious death,” they called it. That didn’t surprise her either.

What took her by surprise was that they wanted her to say she had done it.

They brought both her and Katerina to the station and placed Natasha in a little room with green walls and both bars and netting in front of the window. Katerina was not allowed to stay with her. Natasha could hear her crying in the next room. It was a terrible sound; it filled her so she couldn’t think, it made her chest and stomach ache, and she tried to make the officers understand that she would listen if she could just comfort Katerina first.

They asked her why she had done it.

Done what? she asked.

And then they explained that it was usually wives who killed their husbands, and she had probably grown tired of him and wanted his money. He has no money, she said, while Katerina cried; he owes several hundred thousand. To whom? To U-Card.

That made them hesitate. They went out into the hall and spoke quietly. Then one of them disappeared. The other asked if she wanted tea. No, no tea. Just Katerina. Yes, of course. Something had changed, as if “U-Card” was a magic formula that opened locked doors. Suddenly she was allowed to see her daughter. After a little while, the second policeman left too. Only a secretary remained, sitting at a desk.

Natasha lifted Katerina up onto her hip and asked if she was charged with anything. “No,” said the secretary. “They just want a statement from you.”

“Then it’ll have to be after I go to the doctor with my daughter,” said Natasha, with a new authority. “Can’t you hear how labored her breathing is?”

She left the station. All they had with them was Katerina’s little backpack and what Natasha had in the pockets of her coat; she didn’t even have her wallet. She had to go back to the apartment even though her instinct screamed that she had to get away while she could.

Instead of going up directly, she rang the downstairs neighbors’ buzzer. They had an au pair, Baia, a young girl from Georgia who for some reason was always in a good mood. She and Natasha had taken the children to the playground together on a few occasions—the neighbors had twins, a boy and a girl—but Natasha had the feeling that Baia had been told not to associate with her. There was a certain glint in Baia’s eyes, a secretiveness in her giggling, that made it seem as if they were two teenagers playing hooky from school to smoke cigarettes behind the bicycle shed.

Today Baia wasn’t quite as upbeat as usual.

“I’ve heard,” she said. “Terrible. And the police have been here, also SBU, and they asked a lot of questions and stomped around upstairs for several hours.”

“Have they left?” Natasha asked.

“Yes, I think so. It’s quiet now.”

Katerina stayed with Baia and the twins while Natasha snuck up the stairs. The door was wide open, just like with the first break-in. It was quiet in there, but as Natasha ventured into the front hall, she heard a faint noise from the living room. She glided silently toward the door and looked in cautiously.

Everything had been worked over. Drawers pulled out and overturned, books cleared from the shelves, pillows and cushions cut open so the filling lay like snow across the wreckage. And in the middle of everything, there she was. The Witch. A tiny, bent old woman with white hair and a coat that reached almost down to her ankles and her shiny, high-heeled red shoes. She stood half turned toward the window, and the light shone right through her thin white hair so you could see her scalp and the outline of her skull.

Baba Yaha, thought Natasha, the old witch who lives in a cottage in the woods, a cottage that has legs like a hen and can run around like a living creature.

She stood with a picture of Katerina. The newest one, which they had had enlarged and framed so it could stand on Pavel’s desk. Katerina wore braids and smiled shyly, but there was a sparkle in her big, beautiful eyes. “She looks like someone who is up to mischief,” Pavel had said and had kissed the picture, and then the live model, six or seven times right under the hair at the nape of the neck, until Katerina screeched and said it tickled.

Baba Yaha ate children who came and knocked on her door. The fence around the chicken-legged house was made from human bones.

The old woman suddenly slammed the picture against the side of the table so the glass shattered and shards spilled across the desk and floor with a shrill tinkling. With her thin fingers, she peeled the photograph out of the frame and stuck it in her coat pocket. Natasha only managed to pull back her head just in time as the old woman began to turn around.

There was no time to think. Natasha grabbed her bag from the coatrack in the front hallway and raced down the stairs to Baia. An hour later, she was on her way to the Polish border in a rented car with only the clothes she had on, but with Katerina in the seat next to her, so close that she could touch her once in a while, as if it was necessary to make sure she was still there.

THE BIG MAN, Jurij, had taken them off the main road and into a semi-deserted summerhouse area. The road was only partially cleared, and the small wooden cabins on both sides were dark and cold. Natasha thought she could glimpse the sea among the trees at the end of the dead-end road. Her every instinct told her that this was it, they were going no farther. This was the place where Jurij would do what he planned to do. When he finally slowed the car, there were no longer any houses around them, and the road had narrowed even further. The car’s tires spun a few times in the snow, caught hold and then finally stopped completely when Jurij turned the key and shut off the motor.

For a moment they sat silently in the faint interior light, all three.

“We’ve been looking for you for a long time,” said the big man. “But you know that. Of course you know that.”

He turned in his seat and gazed attentively at her, as if he was searching for an answer in her exposed and battered face. He was old too, thought Natasha, sixty years or more, and he didn’t look anything like the tiny woman he had called mother several times. His face was meaty, his lips broad and spotted by age and tobacco. Only in his brilliant blue eyes could you clearly see that mother and son were related. Even now, in the gloom, and with the eyes partially shaded under a pair of heavy, baggy eyelids. The Witch had given birth to a monster and had suckled it at her own breast. This was not the son the little woman appeared with in the papers. He wasn’t the suit-wearing, beautiful, clean politician. This son was a man who used his hands and got things done. Not the kind who built things but the kind who demolished them.

She avoided his gaze, feeling the blood pooling around the teeth in her lower jaw once more. She didn’t dare spit but instead bent forward and let the blood dribble over her down jacket.

“Your husband, Pavel, was a coward,” Jurij continued, unaffected. “Many believed he was a hero, a journalist who wrote the truth because he was a man with honor and integrity. In reality he only wrote what he was paid to write. And it was almost always lies. The truth, on the other hand, he was well paid to keep hidden.”

Natasha didn’t answer. Her tongue kept getting cut by the jagged edges of her broken molars, and what he said was not news to her. She had known it for a long time. Pavel was no hero.

“The question is,” said the man, and again she felt his searching gaze. “How well did he hide his secrets, and where did he get them? How much does his pretty wife know? And what about his daughter? Even little pitchers have big ears.”

Natasha tried to control herself, but the mention of Katerina made her twitch. And she knew he saw it and would store her weakness somewhere in his memory.

“I know nothing,” she said. The blood sloshed under her tongue and made it hard to speak clearly. “Pavel never told me anything.”

He sighed. An old man’s exhaustion. The big hands rested on the steering wheel.

“Nonetheless,” he said, “I will give you a chance to try and remember something. Where did he hide his papers and pictures?”

Natasha shook her head. “There were only the things in the apartment,” she said, slurring her words. “There wasn’t anything else.”

She sensed at once she’d made a mistake by acknowledging that she knew something. She could see it by the tiniest of twitches in the heavy eyelids. “The things in the apartment …” he repeated. “You know we were there. You know we searched it.”

It was quiet between them for a long moment, during which Natasha heard nothing but the faint hiss of small, hard snowflakes against the car’s windows. Then the man opened the car door with a quick, angry jerk and stomped through the snow to the trunk. The old woman behind her emitted a long sigh and leaned back in her seat. Natasha caught the scent of her perfume and the musky smell of her mummified old body.

“I know nothing.” Natasha turned as far as she could and tried to catch the old woman’s gaze. “I don’t know what you are looking for. Please don’t touch Katerina.”

She would have said more, but it was as if her words hit an invisible glass wall. The old Witch just looked at her. Her narrow face looked almost childish under the dome of the fur hat.

Then the car door on Natasha’s side was thrown open, and Jurij grabbed hold of what was left of her ponytail and pulled her forward until she sat with her face between her legs. He worked fast, cutting the plastic strips off her wrists and attaching her right hand to the seat belt’s buckle with a new one. Then he made a loop around her left hand—a thin rope—no, not a rope, a wire, a plastic-covered wire of the kind used for pulling boats up on the shore.

At the police station, they had shown her pictures of Pavel. Of his shattered hands that looked as if someone had hit them with a hammer. They had asked her why she had done it. Not if she had done it, just why.

She looked up at the man with the heavy eyes and the heavy body and understood for one burning second what he was planning. She opened her mouth without wanting to and felt her ruined lip tighten over her broken teeth, but there was still nothing she could tell him. If she had known, if she had been able to give him what he wanted, she would have.

He tightened the wire and pulled her left arm across the empty driver’s seat, then disappeared out of her field of vision. She could feel by the pull in the wire that he was fastening it to something, but she didn’t know what. He looked over his handiwork, growled, made some adjustments. There was nothing she could do. The seat belt and the plastic strip immobilized her in the seat; she had just a few centimeters’ leeway. The strain in the arm stretching across the seat was uncomfortable, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that her hand was positioned precisely where it would get caught when he slammed the door a few moments from now.

“I know nothing,” she repeated, without any hope that it would stop him.

Surprisingly, he nodded and bent down so that she could see his face better. “I believe you,” he said. “But sometimes one remembers the most incredible things.” He looked like a kindly teacher awaiting an answer from a fumbling student. “I have asked you a question now. And your brain, the computer you have that remembers and thinks, is already hard at work. A little man has been sent down to rummage through the files in the archives, and I’m sure he will come back to us with something. Don’t you think?”

Natasha shook her head silently. The details in his heavy face were imprinting themselves indelibly in her—the drooping cheeks, the burst blood vessels at the point of the cheekbones, the chin covered with bristly stubble, the five or six long hairs from each eyebrow that hung down over his Santa Claus–like blue eyes. She would remember that face till she died.

Which wouldn’t be long—less than half an hour, most likely. That knowledge hit her once again, like a fist under her ribs.

“Look,” he said. He took a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket, smoothed it out and held it so the interior car light illuminated it clearly. It was a printed copy of a black-and-white photograph of two girls. It was old, and the girls were wearing traditional Ukrainian dresses, like the ones folk dancers still used. “Where did this come from?” asked Jurij. “Where did your husband get this picture?”

“I don’t know,” she whimpered. “I know nothing.”

She could feel the icy edge and the mechanism of the lock with the back of her fingers. She tried instinctively to pull her hand back, but the wire didn’t permit it. Jurij straightened up and reached for the car door.

If all my fingers break, I can’t drive, thought Natasha. If my fingers break, I can’t turn the key and shift gears, and I can’t … It felt as if her heart stopped in her chest for a moment. I can’t kill the Witch.

Then he slammed the door. Natasha screamed, but she no longer attempted to pull back. Instead, she pushed her hand as far out of the car as it would go, so the door hit the her wrist and the heel of her hand rather than the fingers. The pain was excruciating, but she could feel that the bone was intact. She wasn’t incapacitated. Not yet.

Suddenly she thought of aspirins.

Why? Why aspirins?

Jurij had opened the door again and was looking at her.

“Yes, it hurts,” he said, as if he were a doctor who was sorry that a necessary vaccination involved a needle prick. “What about the little man? Has he found anything in the archives?”

Little man? There were no small men in her brain. Her brain was a mouse at the bottom of a tin pail, a mouse that raced around, jumped for its life and scrabbled at the smooth surface to find a way out.

He stepped back behind the door, ready to slam it again.

“No,” she said. “No …”

And then it came. An image of Anna’s home. She and Pavel and Katerina are at the dining room table eating cake. It is summer. The first visit to Denmark, and Katerina’s second year in the world. Pavel would have preferred to go alone, he said, because he had many meetings to take care of, and he thought Katerina was still too little to fly. But Natasha pleaded and begged, and at last he’d given in. So now she is here in Denmark with Pavel’s mother’s old nanny. Anna is stern and distant, thinks Natasha, except when it comes to Katerina. With her she chatters cozily in a steady stream of Danish and a few Ukrainian words Pavel must have taught her. “Dog.” “Cake.” “Thirsty.” “Sleepy.” Short children’s words that Katerina understands. Anna stuffs her with chocolate cake and brightly colored chocolate drops. Natasha is tired and has a headache.

“You can take a couple of my pills from the drawer in the bedroom,” says Anna, now in English, which is the language they speak when Natasha is there. Otherwise, Anna and Pavel mostly speak German. It is all a big mess, and it’s so hard to talk to anybody, and maybe that is why Natasha’s head hurts so much. She has the sense that Pavel and Anna share something, that they are keeping her in the dark by speaking a language she doesn’t understand.

“Panodil, aspirin or codeine,” says Anna. “I think I have all three.”

Natasha gets up and goes up into the bedroom and pulls out the top drawer of the dresser. She finds a plastic bottle marked aspirin, unscrews the lid and tips two pills into her hand. A few other pill containers rattle around in there, and at the back, some yellowed photographs lie loosely piled on the flowered paper lining the drawer. One of them shows two girls. It is very old and faded. The girls are dressed in the finest and most festive of traditional styles, and they are both looking seriously into the camera. It isn’t Danish, she can see that, both because of the clothes and because of the lettering that reads, “Mykolayevka. Two nightingales.” It’s a little odd that it’s here, she thinks, but maybe Pavel gave it to Anna. He has his own drawers at home, always kept locked, and in them are many old photographs that he doesn’t want her to tidy or “mess up,” as he calls it. This was before the first break-in. Before he got the scanner.

Natasha leaves this picture alone too. What does she need the past for? The present is bright and happy, at least most of the time—Natasha has discovered that it is entirely possible to be jealous of old ladies, even ones who decidedly do not want to sleep with her husband. Why do they have to chat so intimately in German all the time? Then she scolds herself as he would have, stupid Natasha, silly Natasha, takes the aspirin and joins the others again. They revert to English when they hear her on the steps, and Anna asks if she is feeling better now.

“ANNA!”

Jurij had opened the car door wide, ready to slam it again when Natasha suddenly said the name. Now he hesitated.

“I know where it is,” said Natasha. “The picture. I know who has it!”

Jurij let go of the door. She felt the relief flood her like soft, warm water. Could it really be that simple? Was that really all they wanted? A picture from Anna? Her wrist pounded, sore and painful, but she could still move her fingers and hands, and in a miraculous way she now had a new chance to save Katerina.

“Where?” asked Jurij, and Natasha felt the wire loosen around her aching wrist.

“It’s here,” she said. “In Denmark. I’ll show you where it is.”