Death of a Nightingale

UKRAINE, 1934

“Where is your devil of a sister?”

Olga opened her eyes just as a huge hand hit her roughly on the side of the head. She attempted to roll away from the next blow and to sit up at the same time. Attempted to get free of sleep’s clutches. It took a long moment before she realized that the man standing in front of her wasn’t Father but a man that she had said hello to only a few times down by the cooperative shop. Sergej’s father. Fedir’s uncle. He wasn’t a big man. A bit bent and scarred, like his son.

He looked angry but for some reason Olga was sure that he had just been crying. It was something about his eyes and voice, which was thick and soft as if he had coated his throat with oil.

She didn’t dare say anything because the man clearly wasn’t normal. Men didn’t usually cry. Not in that way, in any case. Olga crept even closer to the wall and pulled the blanket all the way up to her chin, staring at him all the while.

“Fedir is dead,” said the man. He seemed to be mostly telling himself. One tear had made it all the way to his frost-cracked lips and hung there for a moment like a small, clear pearl. Then he sniffed. “Tell me. Tell me where she is, that little bitch of an informer.”

Fedir. She remembered the infatuated puppy eyes he had made at Oxana the day the GPU officers evicted them from the house and sent them off to Siberia in a freight car. Now he had died somewhere out there, like the little girl with the hare-like cry, and that’s why Sergej’s father was standing here, shaking her with red, wet hands.

Olga felt a watery fear in her stomach. A nauseating lurch that went both up and down at the same time, so that something loosened in her bowels. And yet there was, somewhere behind the fear, a sense of unholy scarlet glee. At last, Oxana would be punished. Punished for everything she had done.

“Oxana usually walks along the stream on her way home from school,” she said quickly. “She’s probably on her way home already.”

Sergej’s father let her go, without a word, without a look. He left the door open on its hinges when he walked out, and Olga lay motionless for a long time, watching as his tracks slowly filled with snow.