Death of a Nightingale

UKRAINE, 1935

“Eat!”

The lady at the end of the barrack stood with her arms folded behind her back, her eyes raking down the bench rows, and even though Olga hadn’t been in the dining hall before, she immediately knew what was expected of her, and what the consequences would be if she refused. She could see it in the other children’s faces; they had odd, rigid eyes and didn’t look up or to the side, and she knew it from the two other orphanages she had stayed in over the course of the late summer.

What was expected of her was obedience. Nothing else. The consequences if she refused would target her body first. There would be locked doors, darkness, heat, beatings, hunger or thirst. But they might also be accompanied by humiliation. The recitation of Father’s crimes against the Soviet state, or even worse, the story of Father’s death on the pole where he had “howled like a dog.” All the children around her were orphans like her. Children of class enemies, of the deported or just of parents who had fallen victim to hunger in the great hunger year. Still, the shame burned in her cheeks when the orphanage lady talked about her father. As if the very way that he had died was more undignified than everything else. Up against a pole. Howling like a dog. Thin and bony and beaten and toothless.

Olga shrank down over her plate and stared into the whitish-yellow mass of overcooked potatoes. The soup was covered in flies, which moved only lazily and unwillingly when she pushed at the spoon. Some remained lying there belly-up on the sticky surface, legs kicking. Olga was hungry after the trip from the station to what was called Lenin’s Orphanage Nr. 4. She was someplace near a town called Odessa, she knew, but the orphanage was a lonely and windswept building stuck in the middle of the steppe, and even though there was now a touch of fall in the air, the midday heat was indescribable.

“Eat.”

A sharp elbow poked her in the side, and she glanced at the girl who sat on her right, shoveling down her soup, quickly but at the same time carefully so not a drop was lost between plate and mouth. A pair of buzzing flies that were trapped in the sticky mass went right down the hatch too without the girl taking any notice.

“Eat it or let me have it,” she whispered, looking impatiently at Olga. “The food will be cleared away in five minutes.”

Olga’s stomach growled a warning, unwilling to accept her indecisiveness, and she breathed deeply. She scraped some of the wriggling flies off the soup and brushed them off the spoon with her index finger. The first spoonful was the worst, but afterward it went pretty well. She took a mouthful and let it glide down her throat in one rapid movement, so that she didn’t have time to either taste or feel it in her throat. Her benchmate followed her spoon with hungry eyes, but when Olga had scraped her plate completely clean, the girl took the time to examine Olga.

“What’s your name?” she whispered.

“Oletchka,” said Olga. That’s what it said in her papers now.

“Did you just arrive?”

Olga nodded but wasn’t sure she felt like doing this. She had already met and said goodbye to lots of girls since they had come to take her away from home.

It was the day after they had driven off with Mother. Olga had slept alone in the summer darkness the last night and had lain listening to the grasshoppers and the crickets that chirped in the grass outside in the overgrown garden. Mother hadn’t touched the vegetable plot since Oxana and Kolja died, and through all of July she had just sat on the crumbling clay bench under the porch roof in front of the house, staring into space. Sometimes, not very often, she cried. Other times she asked Olga to sing, and Olga sang quietly and softly, almost as if it were a lullaby, and if she sang long enough, Mother might make a faint grimace which looked like a smile and say that she sang almost as beautifully as Oxana. Her daughter and the people’s nightingale.

Uncle Grachev and Grandmother and Grandfather Trofimenko had been shot in the square where the statue of Oxana was to be erected, but neither Mother nor Olga talked about that during the dark summer nights. In fact, they didn’t speak at all. The neighbors took turns bringing them a little food. Mother didn’t eat anything much, but Olga took what she could get. And waited for something to change. For Mother to either die or get up again so that life could go on. But neither one happened. They just came to get her one day and said she had to be in a hospital because she was ill, and the day after, they also picked up Olga and drove her to the first of the orphanages. She was there for ten days. She lived in the next home for almost a month, and now she was here. With a new lot of strange children. Olga lowered her head, but the girl next to her wasn’t put off that easily.

“Were your parents enemies of the people, or are they just dead?”

“Both, I think. I don’t really know. My sister was a hero.”

The girl stared at her with renewed interest. “What do you mean?”

“My sister is the People’s Nightingale. They’ve erected a statue of her in the square in Sorokivka.”

The girls sitting around them turned toward her, and Olga felt small and miserable and much too visible at the long table.

“I’ve heard of her,” said one of the girls, her eyes narrowed. “There’s a song about her. She reported her father for stealing grain.”

It got completely silent, and Olga followed the skinny little flies wandering across her underarm. Didn’t know what more she should say.

“But if she was your sister …” said a girl, hesitating. She sat right across from Olga. She was a little older, maybe thirteen, with a broad face and black eyes. Probably a Tartar from the Crimea. Olga had seen them at the market back when they were still living in Kharkiv. “You’re full of lies,” the Tartar girl continued. “Because if your sister is the People’s Nightingale, then why are you here?”

“I don’t know,” mumbled Olga and wished she was just as dead as the rest of the world from which she came. “But I can sing too. I can sing ‘Zelene Zhyto’—about the green, green wheat.”

“By heart?”

The girl’s tone seemed to Olga a bit more friendly, and almost against her own will, Olga felt herself grasp at that kindness, cling to it.

“Yes,” she said. “I know a lot of songs by heart.”