When the Doves Disappeared (2 page)

W
E WENT TO
Rosalie’s grave one last time and placed some wild-flowers on the grassy moonlit mound. We were silent for a moment with the blooms between us. I didn’t want to let Juudit go, which is why I said out loud what a person shouldn’t say in that situation:

“We’ll never see each other again.”

I could hear the gravel in my voice, and it brought a gleam of water to her eyes, that gleam that had often knocked me off balance, welling up and sending my rational mind lightly afloat, like a bark boat. Rocking on a stream that flowed from her eyes. Maybe I spoke bluntly to dull my own pain, maybe I just wanted to be cruel so that when she’d left she could curse me and my callousness, or maybe I yearned for some final declaration, for her to say she didn’t want to leave. I was still uncertain of the movements of her heart, even after all we’d been through together.

“You regret bringing me here,” Juudit whispered.

I was startled by her perceptiveness, rubbed my neck in embarrassment. She’d given me a haircut just that evening, and it itched where the hair had fallen down inside my collar.

“It’s all right. I understand,” she said.

I could have contradicted her, but I didn’t, although she hadn’t been a burden. The men had insinuated otherwise. But I had to bring her to the safety of the forest when I heard that she’d had to flee from Tallinn. The Armses’ farm wasn’t a safe place for us with the Russians advancing. The forest was better. She’d been like an injured bird in the palm of my hand, weakened, her nerves feverish for weeks. When our medic was killed in combat, the men finally let Mrs. Vaik come to help us, us and Juudit. I had succeeded in rescuing her one more time, but once she stepped out onto the road that loomed ahead of us, I wouldn’t be able to protect her anymore. The men were right, though—women and children belonged at home. Juudit had to go back to town. The noose around us was tightening and the safety of the forest was melting away. I watched her face out of the corner of my eye. Her gaze had turned to the road that she would leave by; her mouth was open, she was gulping the air with all her strength, and the feel of her breath threatened to undermine my resolve.

“It’s best this way,” I said. “Best for all of us. Go back to the life you left behind.”

“It’s not the same anymore. It never will be.”

PART ONE
 

Then Mark, the guard, came and took them one at a time to the edge of the ditch and executed them with his pistol.

—K. Lemmick and E. Martinson,
12,000: Testimony in the Case of the Mass Murderers Juhan Jüriste, Karl Linnas, and Ervin Viks, Tartu, January 16–20, 1962
, Estonian State Publishing House, 1962

Northern Estonia, Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union

T
HE HUM FROM
beyond the trees was growing louder—I knew what was coming. I looked at my hands. They were steady. In a moment I would be running toward the oncoming column of vehicles. I would forget about Edgar and his nerves. I could see him from the corner of my eye fiddling with his trousers with trembling hands, his face the wrong color for battle. We had just come from training in Finland, where I’d worried whether he would be all right, as if he were a child, but now that we were in combat the situation had changed. We had a job to do. Soon. Now. I took off running, my grenades whacking against my leg, my hand ready to tug one loose from the side of my boot, my fingers already feeling its spin through the air. The Finnish army shirt I’d put on when we were training on Staffan Island still felt new; it gave strength to my legs. Soon all the men would wear only Estonian gear, nobody else’s, not the occupiers’, not the allies’, only our own. That was our aim, to take our country back.

I could hear the others coming behind me, the ground groaning with our power, and I ran still harder toward the hum of the engines. I could
smell the enemy’s sweat, could almost taste the rage and metal in my mouth. It was someone else running in my boots, the same emotionless warrior who in the last battle had leapt over a ditch to throw grenades at the destruction battalion—cap … cord … throw, cap … cord … throw. It was someone else—cap … cord … throw—and that someone was sprinting toward the column. There were more of them than we’d thought. There was no end to the destruction battalions—Russians, and men who looked like Estonians—no end to their vehicles and machine guns. But we weren’t scared. Let them be scared. We had hate running through us, running with such force that our opponents halted, the tires of the Mootor bus spinning in place, our hatred nailing them to the moment when we opened fire. I charged with the others toward the bus and we killed them all.

MY ARMS WERE
trembling from the bullets I fired, my wrists heavy from the weight of the grenades I threw, but gradually I realized the fight was over. When my feet adjusted to staying in one place and the shells stopped raining onto the ground, I noticed that the end of the battle didn’t bring silence. It brought noise. Greedy maggots making their way out of the earth toward the bodies, the eager rustle of death’s minions hurrying toward fresh blood. And it stunk the stink of feces, the reek of vomited bile. My eyes were blinded, the gunpowder smoke was starting to disperse, and it was as if a bright golden chariot had appeared at the edge of the clouds, ready to gather up the fallen—not just our men, but also the destruction battalion men, Russians and Estonians. I squinted. My ears were ringing. I saw men gasping, wiping their brows, swaying like trees where they stood. I tried to keep my eye on the sky, the shining chariot, but I couldn’t just stand there leaning against the battered side of the Mootor. The quickest ones were already moving like shoppers at a market. The weapons had to be collected from the dead. The guns and pocket cartridge belts—nothing else. We waded through body parts, twitching limbs. I had just taken an ammunition belt from an enemy soldier when something on the ground grabbed my ankle. The grip was surprisingly strong, pulling me down toward a murmuring mouth. Before I could take aim, my knees gave way and I slid down next to the dying man—as helpless
as he was, sure that my moment had come. But he wasn’t looking at me. His words were directed at someone else, someone beloved. I didn’t understand what he was saying, he was speaking Russian, but his voice was the kind a man uses only when speaking to his bride. I would have known even if I hadn’t seen the photograph in his stained hand, the white skirt in the picture. The photo was red with a bridegroom’s blood now, a finger covering the woman’s face. I wrenched my leg free and the life disappeared from his eyes, eyes where I had just seen myself. I forced myself to stand. I had to keep moving.

When the weapons were collected, there was a rattle of engines again from farther off and Sergeant Allik gave the order to retreat. We guessed that the destruction battalion would wait for reinforcements before making another attack or searching for the camps, but we knew they would come. The machine gunners had already made it as far as the edge of the forest when I saw a familiar figure bent over a still flailing body: Mart. His feet had already crushed the skull—brains mixed with mud—but still he hit and hit with his rifle butt, as if he wanted to put it all the way through the body and into the ground. I ran over and skidded into him hard, which made him lose his grip on the rifle. He bucked blindly, not recognizing me, roaring at an invisible enemy and thrashing the air, but I got hold of him, took my belt off, wrapped it around him, and led him to the dressing station, where the men were hurriedly piling up the things they’d found. I whispered that this man needed looking after, tapping my temple, and the medic glanced at Mart—who was gasping, frothing at the mouth—and nodded. Sergeant Allik hustled the men onward, snatched a pocket flask from someone’s hand, and shouted that an Estonian doesn’t fight drunk like a Russky does. I started to look for my cousin Edgar, suspecting that he had run away, but he was perched on a rock with his hand over his mouth, his face wet with sweat. I grabbed his shoulder, and when I let go he started to rub his coat with a filthy handkerchief on the spot where I’d touched him with my bloody fingers.

“I can’t do this, Roland. Don’t be angry.”

A sudden disgust sloshed in my chest, and an image flashed through my mind of my mother hiding coffee, brewing it secretly for Edgar and no one else. I shook my head. I had to concentrate, forget about the coffee, forget about Mart, how I’d recognized what I saw in his addled eyes,
a man like the one who had run into battle in my boots. I had to forget the enemy soldier who had grabbed my leg, how I’d recognized myself in his gaze, too, and I had to forget that I hadn’t seen myself in Sergeant Allik’s face. Or the medic’s. This was my third battle since coming back from Finland, and I was still alive, the enemy’s blood on my hands. So where did this sudden doubt come from? Why didn’t I recognize myself in the faces of the men that I knew would survive to see peace come with their own eyes?

“Do you plan to look for more of our men, or stay here and fight?” Edgar asked.

I turned toward the trees. We had a job to do: weaken the Red Army, which was occupying Estonia, and relay information of their progress to our allies in Finland. I still remembered how glad we had been to dress ourselves in our new Finnish gear and form ranks in the evenings, singing,
Saa vabaks Eesti meri, saa vabaks Eesti pind
—Be free, Estonian sea; be free, Estonian land. When we got back to Estonia, my unit only managed to cut a few phone lines; then our radios stopped working and we decided we’d be more useful if we joined up with the other fighters. Sergeant Allik had proved himself a brave man—the Forest Brothers were advancing at a breakneck pace.

“The refugees may need our protection,” Edgar whispered. He was right. The crowds escaping through the cover of the forest were accompanied by several good men, but they were moving slowly because they were surrounded—the only way out was through the swamp. We’d fought like maniacs to give them time, holding the enemy back, but would our victory give them enough of a head start? Edgar sensed my thoughts. He added, “Who knows what’s happening at home? We haven’t heard anything from Rosalie.”

Before I had a chance to think, I was already nodding and on my way to report that we were leaving, going to protect the refugees, even though I was sure Edgar had suggested it only to avoid another attack, to save his own skin. My cousin knew my weaknesses. We had all left our fiancées and wives at home. I was the only one using a woman as an excuse to leave the fight. Still, I told myself that my choice was completely honorable, even wise.

The captain thought it was a good idea for us to leave. Nevertheless,
my mood was strangely detached. Maybe it was because the hearing in my left ear hadn’t returned yet, or because the words of that dying soldier still echoed in my head. It felt as if nothing that had happened was real, and I couldn’t get the stink of death off my hands, even though I washed them over and over when we found a stream. The lines on my palms—the life line, the heart, the head—still stood out in dried blood stamped deep into my flesh, and I walked onward hand in hand with the dead. I kept remembering how my feet had run into battle, how my hands hadn’t hesitated to make my machine gun sing, how when the bullets ran out I grabbed my pistol, and after that some rocks I found on the ground, until in the end I was pounding a Red soldier’s head against the mudguard from the Mootor. But that wasn’t me, it was that other man.