Death of a Nightingale

“Here?”

Jurij stopped the car at the turnoff and squinted down the narrow track that ran between the snow-covered fields.

Perhaps he hesitated because the road was so small. There were only four houses in all: Michael’s, Anna’s farm and then two smaller houses almost all the way down by Isterødvej. Not many cars came this way. In the summer the grass grew so tall in the middle that it brushed against the bottom of the car. In an odd way that was precisely what had made Natasha feel at home. Not in Michael’s house, but on the road that led there. When she lived with Michael, she sometimes did stupid things when he wasn’t home. Walked out of the house and across the pebble-covered front drive, crossed the gravel road on bare feet and continued into the wilderness of knee-high grass and wild oats and clover and elder trees. And then she sat down in the middle of it all, so that she couldn’t see the brick house or the garage or the pebbles, and turned her face to the sun, breathing in the spicy scent of grass and feeling the tiny legs of insects as they crawled across her feet. Strangely enough, it was neither Pavel nor her luxurious life in Kiev that she missed when Michael and she moved in together, but the flowering verges of her childhood. The kind that lined the road when Father and she rode their bikes to Grandfather’s and Grandmother’s farmhouse, the kind she had sworn never to return to. Natasha moved a little in the seat to wake up her hands, which were now bound behind her back again. She let her tongue slide across her broken molars and split gums, which had finally, finally stopped bleeding.

Tonight there was no green anywhere. The snow blew into the wheel tracks, but the road had been cleared not long ago.

“It’s not a one-way street. You can drive through to the big road,” she said.

He didn’t answer. Just turned off the lights and got out of the car. She saw his dark shape pace down to the first turn in the gravel road and disappear. The car quickly became cold now that the motor was turned off. The hole in the side window was already providing plenty of fresh air. Natasha pulled halfheartedly at the narrow plastic strips but quickly gave up. Her right arm and wrist ached, throbbing violently, and the jerky movements only made it worse.

The woman in the backseat shifted uneasily. Now that there was no longer a fresh supply of warm air circulating through the car, Natasha could sense the Witch’s rotten breath. Baba Yaha who ate children.

Jurij returned and got behind the wheel, cursing. He maneuvered the car decisively in between the snowbanks, headlights still off. The snow was falling more heavily. The snowflakes were hard and grainy and rattled against the window like claws.

Jurij wanted to turn in at Michael’s house, but Natasha stopped him.

“It’s farther on,” she said. “The next house.” She saw with a certain relief that there was no sign of life in there. Michael wasn’t home.

The she saw the yellow-and-black tape. POLICE, it said. Her chest constricted, and she couldn’t tell if it was from fear or hope. Right now she’d like one of the nice Danish policemen to come save her from the Witch and her son. But there were no policemen at the barrier, which was disappearing into the snow.

What had happened at Michael’s house? She guessed a part of the answer before she asked, and she had little doubt that Jurij, with his large and capably destructive hands, would be the right person to answer her, if he wanted to.

“What happened?” she said.

“We had to have a chat with your fiancé to find out where you and the girl were,” said Jurij. “He didn’t even know that you had run off, but at least he told us where we could find the little girl. We didn’t think you’d run far if we had her.”

“Did you kill him?”

Jurij didn’t react. “Where are we going?”

Michael was dead. She recognized that in Jurij’s indifference. For him Michael was just as irrelevant as Natasha, who would also be dead in a very short time and therefore had already been removed from his calculations.

“Farther along,” she said flatly. “On the other side of the hill.”

Jurij engaged the gears again and let the car eat its way up the rise and down the other side. Behind them, Michael’s house disappeared from sight. He was gone. Everything he had been, everything he had done to her, was gone now. She felt nothing at the thought.

Jurij let the car roll into the drive that led to Anna’s farm.

“I’m going to park it behind the stable over there.” Jurij pointed at one of the farm’s yellow outbuildings. “It’s best if the car can’t be seen from the road, so there’ll be a little bit of walking, Mamo. Are you sure you want to come?”

Natasha sensed the old woman’s movements in the backseat. A determined nod, she assumed, because Jurij sighed, resigned.

He parked behind the low half wall that had once encircled the farm’s midden. They got out and walked along the sheltered side of the stable where the snow wasn’t piled as high, Natasha in front, with her hands still bound behind her back. Then Jurij and the old woman, side by side, like an aging couple. The old woman kept up surprisingly well, noted Natasha, in spite of the fact that the snow was ankle deep here and in several places slippery and uneven in the deep tracks left by a tractor.

The light in the hall was on, but Jurij didn’t waste any time knocking. He pushed at the door, and when it opened—as usual, Anna hadn’t locked up—he shoved Natasha ahead of him onto the pale golden floor tiles. Anna’s rubber boots and clogs were arranged along the wall on clean and dry newspapers. The heat from the large kitchen hit her, and the snow brought in by their shoes melted almost instantly, making small, dirty pools on the floor. Poor Anna would have to get out the mop, thought Natasha, and marveled at how ordinary the thought was.

The old woman had followed her son and now approached the huge oven in the middle of the room with outstretched hands. Heat emanated from it and made the air billow in waves around the birdlike figure.

I could kill her when he turns his back, thought Natasha. Maybe she wouldn’t even need her hands. She pictured herself rushing toward the old woman, cracking her own head against that frail old skull. Would it be enough? Or a kick. Maybe she could knock her down and kick her in the head. That was probably better.

Jurij had promised that he would leave Katerina and her alone as soon as they had found the picture. Beautiful, stupid Natasha would have believed him. In fact, she wanted to believe it, just as she also wanted to believe his promise not to touch Anna. But she was no longer beautiful, stupid Natasha, and she had seen her future in his indifferent gaze.

“Call her,” said Jurij quietly. He had already checked both the boiler room and the kitchen and had taken the safety off his gun, which he now directed at the door to the living room.

Natasha felt her fear return. “Is that really necessary?” She nodded at the gun.

Jurij shrugged but apparently saw no reason to put it away. “Call her.”

Natasha called Anna, halfheartedly but still loud enough that Anna should have been able to hear her. Anna’s hearing was fine, she knew. There was no answer, and she realized that she hadn’t heard the usual clicking of dog paws across the floor. No barking and no wagging mutt, whacking its tail into cabinets and chair legs.

“The dog,” said Natasha and nodded at the water bowl that sat on the floor near the door to the hallway. “She must be out with the dog.”

“In this weather?”

Jurij looked skeptically out the window above the kitchen sink. Snow whirled among the rosebushes in the yellow glow from the patio lights. He slammed open the double doors leading to the living room, walked with long strides into the room and started to systematically open cabinets and drawers.

As the work progressed, he spread papers and folders in a thin layer across the floor. He picked up a few and threw them on the floor again. Lingered briefly over a small tape recorder, but let it go and continued with a row of cans decorated with flowers that stood on the shelf above the couch. He pulled off the lids and upended them so that the contents—buttons and sewing material—flew out in all directions and hit the floor with small, distinctive whacks.

“Where was it you found the picture?” he asked then. “Show us.”

“Upstairs,” she said. “In the bedroom.”

He made her go up the stairs first. She could feel the light pressure of the gun barrel under her right shoulder blade and tried to calculate what the bullet would hit if the gun went off right now. Probably a lung. And her heart, depending on the angle. She had never been particularly interested in biology, but she had, after all, seen pigs slit open, with intestines and kidneys and liver hanging out of the body cavity. She knew where the organs were, and none of them were expendable.

“But he won’t shoot you, right? Not yet.” Natasha formed the words silently with her lips. Here in Anna’s house, the voice that usually lived in her head had gone conspicuously silent. She forced herself to look at the staircase in front of her. One step at a time. The Witch was also on the stairs now, but Natasha was already up. Too late to let herself stumble backward and crush the bird skeleton in the fall.

Jurij turned on the light in the bedroom and ordered Natasha to lie on the floor, which was surprisingly difficult with her hands bound behind her back. She managed to get on her knees, and Jurij pushed her the rest of the way so that she fell forward and hit her shoulder and chin on the wooden floor.

Then he opened the dresser drawer and emptied its pill containers and papers out onto the bed. The picture of Anna and her husband on vacation with palm trees and a light blue pool in the background fluttered to the floor in front of Natasha’s face. Then the tips of Jurij’s shoes approached her forehead.

“You didn’t lie, did you? Sometimes people lie because that’s all they can remember how to do. Maybe you are like your husband.”

He touched her very lightly with the tip of his shoe. The sole scratched the bridge of her nose. The shoes were still wet. She turned her face away and waited while he looked under the bed and behind the wardrobe’s enormous mirrored doors. She could see that the Witch had entered the room now, her feet making their way around the bed. Then she stood still and looked at the wall Anna had covered with pictures of her daughter. Natasha knew the pictures well. The daughter was called Kirsten and in the first pictures had been photographed at age three while she held an old-fashioned red phone in her hand and smiled in a friendly way at the photographer. Farther down was a row of more or less anonymous school photos in which the girl’s hairdo varied between short and slightly longer. In two of the pictures, her teeth were covered by braces. Then came the graduation photo, pictures of Kirsten with Anna’s grandchildren, pictures of Hans Henrik and Kirsten at an amusement park with the kids. Katerina loved the photos, and for some reason the Witch also remained standing in front of the portraits. Natasha could see that she was leaning forward. Her head moved in small, uneven, hen-like jerks. Then she turned to the nightstand and picked up Anna’s and Hans Henrik’s wedding picture.

The Witch’s hands shook so much that the picture rattled between her fingers. How old was she? Eighty-five? Eighty-six? Too old to lay a fair claim to more years in this life, and yet she was winning and Natasha was in the process of losing.

“Who is that?”

The Witch held the framed photo out to Natasha. Natasha couldn’t see it properly from her position on the floor, but she remembered it from the many times she had been lying in this room, on Anna’s bed, while everything hurt and she had fled from Michael, and Anna was patting her hair and murmuring, “There, there, there,” as she tried to console her. Anna had said that Michael was better than Ukraine, and that was true, at least most of the time.

Natasha had looked at it so often. The picture of a woman who had married a good man and had lived a long life with him in peace and safety in Bacon Land. Wedding Anna smiled a bit crookedly and had her eyes partially closed against the sun. Her hair was in thick, roller-induced ’50s curls under the veil, and she was made up almost like a movie star. Hans Henrik was young and strong and kind, had shiny, brushed-back black hair and didn’t look like the thin and aging man she had come to know on her first visits to Denmark those last years before he died.

“That’s Anna,” said Natasha tiredly.

The old woman in front of her looked as if someone had physically shoved her. She tottered in her impractical half-heeled boots. Even now, with death so close that the old biddy must be able to feel the cold gust of annihilation through all the layers of shiny sable fur, she insisted on dressing like a woman.

“That’s a lie. You’re lying.”

Jurij, who had stopped in the middle of dresser drawer number three, turned around and stared silently at them, and Natasha shook her head. She couldn’t do anything more than that because of her awkward position on the floor. She tested her strips again, but nothing yielded even slightly.

The old Witch leaned against the wall for a moment. Her breathing had become heavier, and she picked up the picture from the floor again, narrowing her eyes as she studied it.

“You don’t need to search any further,” she said to Jurij. “Finish here and come downstairs. We’ll wait for her by the oven.”

Jurij grabbed Natasha’s armpit and hauled her to her feet, but the faint sound of a motor from outside stopped him mid-gesture.

“Shit!”

He released her and let her tumble to the floor so he could reach out for the light switch and turn off the light in the bedroom.

“Stay where you are,” he said to his mother. “I’ll take care of this.”

He grabbed hold of Natasha and dragged her across the bedroom floor to the little bathroom Anna had had put in so she didn’t need to go downstairs at night. He swore the whole way but didn’t let go until he had thrown Natasha on the tiles by the bathroom door. This time, she fell flat on her face and chipped her front tooth. He kicked her the rest of the way in, took the key and locked the door behind him.

Natasha lay on the floor and felt her tears burn in the cuts on her cheek. She was dizzy and wanted to let herself fall into unconsciousness, the way she had sometimes done when Michael was at his worst. Anna wasn’t there to help, neither in reality not in Natasha’s head. And maybe she would never help again after what Natasha had done.