When the Doves Disappeared (13 page)

He could give up his cover position at the Norma factory guard booth. The advance and the brown envelopes from the Office would be enough to live on very well.

He could get gas heat.

He honestly couldn’t believe his luck.

The only problem was that the peace he needed for his work was nonexistent at home. He’d hinted that he would require an office for his research, but there had been no progress in the matter, and he couldn’t reveal the nature of his work to his wife. There was no point in hoping that its importance would calm her nervous attacks. He went back to his desk and unbuttoned his collar. He had to get started. Porkov was already waiting for a taste, the first few chapters, and so much was at stake—the whole rest of his life.

Tallinn, Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union

T
HE WIND FROM
the cellar of the Pagari building hit Comrade Parts hundreds of meters before he reached the metal doors of the entrance. The same peculiar wind had swept his ankles when he was a young man visiting the building in the first Soviet occupation, before the Germans came. He’d been there to meet his colleague Ervin Viks on matters of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. He remembered how Viks had stepped out of the door to the cellar just as Parts stopped to shake the snow from his overcoat. There were bloodstains on Viks’s cuffs. His shoes left red tracks on the white tile floor. There were all kinds of rumors going around at the time about a decompression chamber located in that cellar. For Parts, that wind was the worst thing about the place. He recognized it now, guiding him with a certainty from the street to the entrance. The Directorate of State Security was the same from one decade to the next. There wasn’t a wind like that anywhere else. It followed you into the elevator and up the stairs, blew straight into Porkov’s office and across the parquet floor, and shook Parts’s carefully constructed confidence as he stepped in front of the captain. Parts could feel the floor, its every contour,
through the soles of his feet, as if his new shoes had been switched for the ones he wore in his youth, the ones with steel toe taps and soles so thin that the sand got in and chafed his toes.

Porkov smiled from beneath a picture of the leaders. He was sitting behind his desk with his elbows on top of a folder he’d closed purposefully slowly, slowly enough that Parts had time to get a glimpse of his own picture inside. They spent a moment admiring the charming view from Porkov’s office window onto Lai Street. You could even see the Baltic, and the steeple of St. Olaf’s Church, according to Porkov. Parts squinted. He could just barely make out the tip of St. Olaf’s tower. For a fleeting moment he imagined what it would be like if someday he had an office like this one, his own department, here where the corridors felt like corridors of power, and the wind from the cellar blew on someone else’s ankles, not his. He would let the office workers use the old servants’ elevator and use only the main elevator himself. He would have keys to all the offices, the communications center, the film archives, and the cellars. The messages spitting out of the telex tapping through the night would be his messages. The goings-on of all the citizens. Every telephone conversation. Every letter. Every business. Every relationship. Every career. Every life.

A draft fluttered his pant leg. Porkov cleared his throat. Parts sat up straighter, adjusted his shoulders. The invitation to Porkov’s bright office was a mark of esteem, and he should behave accordingly, and pay attention. A crystal carafe sparkled in the last rays of the setting sun. Porkov poured drinks into Czech crystal glasses, turned on the milk glass ceiling light, and pronounced himself very satisfied. Parts swallowed—they had looked at his pages. Porkov was in a benevolent mood. The honey of Porkov’s praise put Parts momentarily into a sticky state of mind; first he was blushing speechlessly, then stuttering and struggling to make some response.

After a drink he had to pinch himself, remind himself that he must use this to his advantage. He had passed the Glavlit censorship offices at Pärnu Highway 10 on his way home many times and looked up at the windows on the highest floors, wishing, as any man would, that he could go inside to show the progress of his manuscript to the staff there, who would understand its significance, its accuracy. The dream was enough. He wouldn’t actually ever do it, wouldn’t ever see the censors he was supposed
to impress. Instead he should try to get in to talk to the publisher located in the same building, and soon after that, the publisher would owe him some money. But these things would happen in their own time—it was wisest to wait until later to remind the people there about the advance. First he had to keep Porkov happy, to earn his trust. Best not to disturb the Comrade Captain’s mood, not sound impertinent when he made his request—he wanted more archive materials to broaden his research.

Porkov was getting tipsy. The bottle was already half-emptied, and as he poured more liquor into it their chat started to skate along doubly well. At first Porkov pretended not to understand Parts’s roundabout question—the flicker of surprise in his eyes was sharp enough that Parts guessed he was exaggerating his drunkenness, just as Parts was. But Parts, too, could put brash behavior down to drunkenness if need be, and with that in mind he forced himself to present his request directly. He let an offended expression show through, mumbled that he was certain he would recognize more dregs of humanity in the archives, that he would be able to identify them. Porkov laughed, slapped him on the back, and said: We’ll see. Have another drink. We’ll see.

As he poured more vodka, Porkov glanced at him again from behind his drunken face, and Parts dried his eyes, let his posture sink into a tipsy softness, pretended to set his glass down and miss the table, and restrained his hand from brushing the dandruff from his shoulder.

“You’ve already been given an abundance of material for your work. It ought to be enough. We have our instructions, Comrade Parts.”

Parts hastened to express his gratitude for their confidence in him and added, “I’m quite certain that the Comrade Captain would be considered a hero in Moscow, should the final manuscript exceed expectations.”

These words brought Porkov to a halt in front of him.

“Of course, you might find something in the materials that no one else has.”

“Exactly. I was, after all, an eyewitness to the crimes of the fascist scum, and would have lost my life if the Red Army hadn’t liberated the Klooga camp. I’ve dedicated my life completely to recording those heroic events and laying bare the crimes of the Hitlerist cancer. I might even recognize the names of the guards. Many of them were nationalists who later became bandits.”

Porkov burst into laughter again, drops of his spit landing in Parts’s glass, and Parts joined in, flavoring his cackle with a touch of shared understanding. Every man in the Comrade Captain’s position hoped for a promotion, and Porkov’s operation was well up to speed. Could he resist a gold-paved road to Moscow? There had been numerous recent books about the escapades of the Hitlerists, and they’d been distributed so widely abroad that Parts knew the operation was considered important. For whatever reason, the Politburo placed an emphasis on these things in Estonia. And that was always a spur to competition.

Porkov filled their glasses again.

“I’m hosting a little evening party at my summer place. Come with your wife. I want to meet her. It’s time we started planning your future. The Estonians are hiding the nationalists, and they don’t realize the danger they’re in. The problem is one of morals. The morals of the nation have to be improved, and it’s clear that you have the talents needed to do it.”

COMRADE PARTS’S STOMACH
started to gnaw at him while he was still on the bus. It wasn’t because of the drinks. It was because he was going home and Porkov’s invitation worried him. The Comrade Captain had seemed inclined to grant his archive request, but could he stay in his favor if he refused the invitation? The bright kitchens and clink of dinner dishes in the passing houses depressed him. Two doors down they made fricadelle soup on Wednesdays and macaroni with milk for the children on Thursdays, with meat for the man of the house. They made jam. Parts had a cold stove and a pot of potatoes covered in lukewarm water on the burner waiting for him at home. There were no more cutlets like in their early married years, not since he came back from Siberia, or any berries from the bushes in the yard—his wife hadn’t once spread ashes under them.

But a surprise greeted him at the front steps—sheets on the clothesline, flapping in the wind. He stood for a moment admiring the fluttering linens, the most charming thing he’d seen in a long time, although they ought to have been brought in by this time of day. Still, his wife had done the laundry, at home! Suddenly even her coy habit of hiding her
underwear beneath the sheets to dry didn’t annoy him, or the fact that his bath had been empty that morning, or the fact that soaking the linens for hours in Fermenta was by no means good for them, or that their fight about using the common laundry was about to begin again (he could tell the sheets had been washed in the machines, and they were edged with Auntie Anna’s handmade lace, after all). But what of these small details? Perhaps the situation wasn’t hopeless. Perhaps things were changing for the better. Perhaps they could accept Porkov’s invitation.

Parts approached the front door. Liszt came barreling out of his wife’s record player all the way to the yard. At the front steps, the railing trembled under his hand as he took hold of it for support. Hope and the suspicion that he would be disappointed battled in his mind as he took his keys out of his pocket, clicked open the lock, and stepped over the threshold without turning on the light. There was a whining sound from the living room, a light through the glass in the door. A wailing that rose and fell, sometimes fumbling out in words. Still, Parts hoped that the living room door would open and his wife would come to meet him, that it would all be a cheerful lark, but disappointment was hatching like a worm in an onion, the twinge of hope brought on by the laundry in the yard was stubbed out in the overflowing ashtray on the telephone table. He put his Moroccan leather briefcase down beside the trumeau, hung his coat on the rack, and changed his shoes for his slippers. Only then did he feel ready to push open the door, which stood ajar, and face the state his wife was in.

She was rocking back and forth in the beam of orange light from the ceiling fixture, the hem of her coat dress lifted to her waist, her underslip stained, her bloated face hidden by her tangled hair, the record player pounding. A lit cigarette smoked in the ashtray, its tip glowing, a bottle of Beliy Aist cognac was half empty, a mass of striped men’s handkerchiefs wet with weeping lay heaped under the table. Parts closed the door quietly and went into the kitchen. His steps were heavy. The sheets could wait. The smooth meeting at the Pagari building had lulled him into a ridiculous feeling of optimism. He had just hoped, hoped so strongly, that they could go to the party together, as a couple. How stupid he was.

Years ago it had been different. Parts had received a letter in Siberia from Auntie Anna that said his wife was well, was in her care. The knowledge
that his wife was all right didn’t stir any emotion in him, although the message was the first of its kind in years. He didn’t know what she’d been doing before the German withdrawal. He himself had been tried and put on a train to Siberia quite soon afterward, and news of his wife hadn’t been uppermost in his mind. But when he’d finally made it to the last leg of his journey back to Estonia, it felt good to have someone to go home to. Anna and Leonida were already gone, as was his biological mother, Alviine, and there were strangers living in the Armses’ house. He had no one else. He found his wife in Valga, in a small but clean flat, its air tainted by the stink from the one communal water closet, which was in the neighboring apartment. The room itself had been orderly, his wife attentive in her sense and her hygiene, nodding slowly as he stressed that if anyone asked about his years in Siberia it would be best to remember that he had been convicted for being a counterrevolutionary and for trusting in the third alternative and in the English, that he’d been given ten years for it, for gathering Estonia’s own troops after the Germans had left, and for his espionage training on Staffan Island. She could certainly tell that to anyone else who’d been to Siberia, and she should remember her brother’s fate.