Death of a Nightingale

UKRAINE, 1934

“Don’t take that one. It isn’t ripe.”

Olga glowered at Oxana, who had followed her into the garden and now drew herself up in a wide-legged stance, with an annoyingly grown-up frown on her face. It was so typical of Oxana to interfere just when Olga had gotten permission to go pick a melon for tea, if she could find one that was ready. Olga was the one who had helped Mother dig and turn the earth and place the small brown seeds in the ground one by one. Shouldn’t she also be the one who decided when the first melon was ripe? Oxana might be two years older, but that didn’t make her any wiser. No way was this going to be her decision!

To prove that she was right, Olga quickly bent down and rapped hard with her knuckles on the biggest melon, just like Mother usually did. The sound was muffled and hollow, and Olga felt as if she could almost see the red fruit through the rind, heavy and sweet and juicy. Her mouth began to water.

“What about the other side?”

Oxana pushed Olga lightly and hit the melon on its yellow, dirt-covered bottom, making a flat, wooden crack.

“See for yourself,” said Oxana seriously. “It won’t be completely ripe for a few more days.”

“I don’t give a fart,” Olga said sourly. “We can eat it today, and it’ll be perfectly fine—and anyway, I’m the one who gets to decide.”

Oxana frowned again. “Speak properly,” she said. “You’re starting to sound just like the boys. It’s better to wait until that melon tastes right. It’s only dogs and boys—little boys—who can’t help eating whatever is in front of their noses. Anyone with half a brain waits to dig up the potatoes until they are big and leaves the apples on the tree while they are small and green and sour.”

Olga shook her head and suddenly couldn’t help thinking about Mashka, who had had a litter of puppies last year and had scrounged around the compost heap for food until October. Mother had once slapped Olga because she had snuck a piece of rye bread out to the dog, and after that Mashka had had to manage on her own with whatever mice and rats she could catch. Mashka hadn’t had time to wait for the potatoes to get big, or for the mice to get fatter, for that matter. Right after Christmas both she and the puppies had disappeared from the back shed, and it wasn’t hard to figure out who had taken her, because at that same time, a group of Former Human Beings had drifted down the village’s main street, reaching out with their skeletal fingers for anything edible on their way. The bark had been peeled from the trees, sparrows shot out of the sky; they had even eaten dirt.

Olga shuddered.

Poor Mashka. She herself had looked like a dead dog in the end, so perhaps it had been for the best that she had been freed from her suffering. But still. It wasn’t nice of Oxana to speak badly of dogs in that way. They just did what they had to do to survive. Just like everyone else.

Olga grabbed hold of the watermelon and twisted it defiantly so that it let go of the vine with a small, crunchy snap. “It’s ripe.”

Oxana sighed in the way that meant that Olga was so childish, and Oxana herself so much more grown-up. But she nonetheless quickly followed Olga around to the covered veranda, where Mother had already heated water in the samovar. Mother took the melon, split it in half on the cutting board with the largest knife they had and didn’t say a word about it not being ripe.

Olga looked triumphantly at Oxana. But Oxana just laughed and gave Olga’s braid a friendly tug. It was odd. Sometimes Oxana pretended to be grown-up even though she wasn’t. Other times she was just Oxana, like now, when she lifted little Kolja up from the rough planks on the veranda and danced around with him in her arms, as if there were a balalajka orchestra in her head. Kolja twisted his skinny little four-year-old body to get loose. He was a serious boy; even when he laughed, he somehow looked serious, as if he didn’t believe that anything could be all that funny. Oxana’s smile, on the other hand, shone like a sun, and she was beautiful, Olga thought, even now when she had just lost a tooth in both sides of her lower jaw and the new ones were growing in a little bit crooked. She was ten years old and a hand’s breadth taller than Olga, but her teeth still looked too big for her narrow face. Her eyes were as blue as cornflowers.

Mother pulled off Kolja’s shirt and vest so he could eat the first piece of watermelon without smearing the juice all over his clothes. Olga got the next piece and was just about to take a bite when she realized something was wrong.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Father?”

“If he’s not home in time for tea, there’s not much we can do about it,” said Mother. Her mouth had gotten small even though she was still smiling. “He’ll be here soon enough.”

“But …” Oxana had also stopped now, one hand hovering about the platter. “I can run down to the office and get him.”

“No, never mind,” said Mother. She pulled her blouse out and fanned it back and forth to get a little air against her skin. “He’ll probably be here soon.”

This was wrong.

As long as Olga could remember, they had eaten the first watermelon together—all of them. When they lived in town, it had been a day of celebration, when Father cut the pieces and said funny things when he handed them out. “To my most highborn princess” or “to the most beautiful flower in the field.”

Olga shifted uneasily in her seat, but she didn’t say anything. It was one of the hottest summer days so far. Clothes felt sticky and itchy on the body, rubbing at the lice bites that had kept Olga and little Kolja awake all night. Mother had changed the straw in the mattresses, boiled the sheets and rubbed petroleum on the sleeping shelf, but the lice still bit in the heat and darkness until Olga was about to go mad. For some reason they weren’t as interested in Oxana.

Olga scratched her neck and looked uncertainly at her big sister. It would have been best if Father was there too, but the large, sweet watermelon pieces lay in front of her, and it was unbearable. Oxana was right about that. She was no good at waiting.

She reached across the platter and took a thick slice. It was so juicy that the water dripped from her fingers, and when she took the first bite, it was wonderfully sweet and immediately pushed away her bad conscience. Mother could keep her rye bread, pickles and thyme tea today, and Oxana could stare at her as sourly as she liked. Olga took another piece.

“You’re such a baby,” Oxana said, outraged. “I’m waiting for Father.”

Olga stuck out her tongue and kicked at Oxana under the table, but for once Mother didn’t say anything. She had taken a piece of melon herself, bending her head over the table and carefully spitting out the black, mature seeds onto a piece of newspaper to be dried and saved for next year’s crop. Then she pushed the plate of pickles toward Oxana. “Eat.”

Oxana shook her head and glanced up the road.

Something was wrong. Olga could feel it all the way in the pit of her stomach. A kind of dark energy shone out of Mother now. It was like the wind that suddenly arrived and stirred up the dust in the road before a thundershower. From the Pretrenkos’ house on the other side of the cabbage patch, Olga could hear laughter and Vladimir shouting something or other at Jana. Other than that, everything was quiet in the oppressive afternoon heat.

“Do you want to spoil the food?” Mother asked. She was pale with anger now. “Eat, or I guarantee that you will go to bed without food. Your father is drinking his tea someplace else today.”

Oxana looked frightened. Mother rarely got angry, but when she did, she sometimes struck them. Mother’s hands were hard and dry as wood. Now she got up abruptly and began shoving the food off the table with angry gestures. Kolja reached out fast, grabbed two more pieces of melon and raced down to the bottom of the garden with his prize. Olga remained petrified, looking at her mother. A kind of hidden knowledge began to bubble up to the surface.

The arguments had woken her in the night several times in the first months of spring. When Mother and Father argued, they whispered instead of shouting, so that it sounded like an excited hissing in the dark. Mother had never hidden the fact that she would have preferred to stay in Kharkiv, where Father had been a factory manager and a highly respected member of the Party. Even in the great hunger year, they had had bread and also a little sugar, salt and vegetables. To return to the village was suicide, she had said, but even though she cried, Father insisted.

It was the Party that had asked him to take over the management of the collective because he was known in the village and had a bit of experience with farming from his boyhood. And the Party was greater than Mother’s tears, that much Olga knew. Father loved his Party and his country and would do everything possible to ensure that everyone would be better off. He would build a better future with his own hands. Olga had been on Mother’s side, but of course Oxana had been on Father’s, as she always was. And he was the one who got what he wanted in the end. Mother had dried her eyes, packed their things in silence and had followed him to the village where they had both grown up.

They had arrived in Mykolayevka in the fall right after the harvest, and Olga had hated the place instantly. Half the village’s houses stood empty, with rattling shutters and broken planks and beams. Most of the trees along the main street had been chopped down, and the few that were left had been stripped of their bark and were as dead as the houses around them. Just two poplars remained by the house of the village soviet, their silver leaves rustling in the wind. The few people in the street were thin and starved and dressed in layer upon layer of rags and coats full of holes. Even Father had looked frightened, Olga thought, but then he said that this year, the harvest was already safe. The horror stories of the great hunger year would soon be only that: stories. They would see; it would soon get better. Oxana believed him, but Olga’s stomach hurt, and she tried to hide her face against Mother’s chest.

The first winter had been just as terrible as Mother had feared. Even though Father was the foreman for the kolkhoz, and the harvest was better than the previous year, the bread rations were meager. Father would not take more for his family than the ordinary workers received, Oxana reported proudly. Just once, he had brought home a load of potatoes and a barrel of rancid salt pork that he had bought on the open market, and that had lasted a whole month.

It had not been enough. Not even the salt pork had staved off the hunger altogether and silenced the hollow ache under the ribs. And spring had been the worst. While everything bloomed around them, hunger had gnawed at their stomachs worse than ever.

It wasn’t Father’s fault, that much Olga understood. And it had gotten better in the course of the first warm summer months. But Mother still cried and scolded all the time and was thin and tired and grey even though the sun was shining and they had been able to collect the first potatoes in the garden over a month ago. She had lost two teeth in her lower jaw, which now gaped as emptily as Oxana’s.

But it occurred to Olga now that the whispered arguments in the night throughout the spring had not been just about Mother’s longing for Kharkiv and her fear of cold and starvation.

Father drank his tea someplace else.

A picture of Father down by the sawmill in the company of a smiling, full-figured woman whirled through Olga’s head, followed by the laughing mug of Sergej from school. Sergej had lice and stank, like the little pig he was.

“What do you think of the widow Svetlova?” he had asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you like her?”

Olga shrugged. She had no interest in talking with Sergej, who was seven and disgusting to look at, with large pox scars on his forehead.

“You father does,” he said and pulled his index finger quickly back and forth through a circle he made of the index finger and thumb on his other hand. It was deeply disquieting even though Olga didn’t understand what it meant.

The realization hit her now like a spurt of blood, burning her cheeks and her stomach.

The widow Svetlova had made it through the winter in a better state than Mother. She had no children and was younger. Much younger, with round cheeks and broad white teeth without a single gap.

Oxana sat with her head lowered and picked at the splinters in the table. She was probably pouting because she hadn’t gotten any melon, but she didn’t deserve any better.

“Now look what you’ve done,” hissed Olga. “You’ve made Mother sad.”

Oxana shrugged. She scowled, eyes full of tears.

“You’re such a baby,” was all she said. “You wouldn’t be able to wait for anything if your life depended on it.”