When the Doves Disappeared (35 page)

When we got through the gate, we headed for the woods. I put my
hand over my mouth, covered my nostrils with my fingers. Those who had tried to escape had been shot in the back. Their corpses lay strewn among the trees. Alfons and I couldn’t look at each other, or to the side, or to where the heat was coming from. Charred trunks, pale, recently felled trees, and what was between them. The arms poking up, the legs, the shoed and shoeless soles of feet. I focused my eyes far ahead. I would look for the first farm I could find, change my clothes, ask for food. Surely someone would help us. We would say that the Germans had left. I kept going forward. I would never think about what I’d left behind. This was the moment we had waited for, prepared for. The Germans were gone and the Russians still hadn’t arrived to take over. We wouldn’t let them make it this far.

PART SIX
 

In the imperialist West the cruel voice of the nationalist retributionists is yammering ever louder, the cesspools they’ve created in New York, Toronto, London, Stockholm, and Gothenburg are seething like ants’ nests. We must remember that the emigrant “committees” or “councils” that have sprung up in these cesspools are always nests of destruction, filled with spies. The traitor’s palette of the nationalists is never-ending! The enemy never sleeps, never forgets! It continues its work of destruction and that’s why the new generation must be vigilant. Since the bankruptcy of Hitlerist Germany a new generation has arisen that has only heard of those strange days in textbooks and the talk of those who lived through that time. Soon there will be no eyewitnesses left, no more books witnessing that sadism. The next generation must nevertheless remember that this so-called free world is where nationalist Fascist murderers walk free, and New York echoes with their trumpets!

—Edgar Parts,
At the Heart of the Hitlerist Occupation
, Eesti Raamat Publishing, 1966

Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

T
HE MOSCOW SALAD WAS EATEN,
the small pot of coffee drunk. Comrade Parts would order another directly, although it wouldn’t help his frustration. He had been sitting in Café Moskva for hours and there was still no sign of the Target. The whelp was late, and Parts didn’t know when he’d be able to go home. Maybe not until the café closed its doors. Parts blinked, trying to stay awake. His new assignment was a respectable one, but it had been a shock at first.

Parts had stared at the photo of the Target on the desk at the safe house—sideburns, pimples, the self-satisfied look of youth, a face that life had hardly yet touched. He couldn’t understand what was happening. He still didn’t understand. A job had been allotted to him in an operation whose purpose was, from what he could tell, to survey the anti-Soviet activities of students. His new priority was to keep an eye on a twenty-one-year-old pup who was part of this group—who he met, where, and when. Parts had permission to continue his writing, but only so long as it didn’t interfere with his new duties.

When he’d stepped out into the street after being given the assignment, the cobblestones under his feet had felt slippery in spite of the dry weather, and he had the vague nausea that portended a migraine. His
relationship with Porkov had become one of trust, the manuscript was coming along well, and no sign of dissatisfaction had marred their relationship. The three-year deadline for his book hadn’t even run out. But he wasn’t going to answer to Porkov anymore—he’d been given a new supervisor. His last meeting with Porkov had been completely normal. If someone had finally noticed the stolen notebook, why hadn’t they come looking for it? Had he made some other mistake? Was the Café Moskva assignment meant as a reprimand? Or had Porkov himself been transferred due to some infraction? Parts’s new assignment made no sense. The Office had its own men for surveillance, and he wasn’t an expert at this, not with the brief training he had received. He was known as a handwriting specialist. Why then did the Office think this job was appropriate for him?

Next to the information on the Target was a list of materials to be returned to the Office, including Porkov’s most recent version of the “Prohibited Information in Print Publications, Radio, and Television.” Parts wondered if they would let him have the revised list when it came out, whether they would consider it unnecessary for him now. Although he’d read the directive and knew it inside and out, he hadn’t liked the demeaning tone of the order to return it. It was a reminder of who was in charge. At least he was allowed to keep the typewriter at home.

His colleague in the corner of the dining room ordered some tea. Parts averted his eyes—he was ashamed for the man. There was a popular joke going around town: You can tell a spy by the way he closes one eye when he drinks his coffee—because Russians are used to drinking tea from a glass with a spoon sticking out. The joke had made Parts laugh, but not anymore. He could tell his colleague was an Office man from a mile away. He just sat and stared, the table empty in front of him. Maybe it was some new method the Office was using, a way to make people conscious of the all-seeing gaze of the authorities. Parts didn’t believe in such methods. He believed in naturalness and invisibility, which was why he had first tried to strike up a flirtation with some silly secretary or clerk at the factory. Women always offered a believable excuse for hanging out in cafés. Flirting with women was time-consuming and expensive, however, and Parts had ended up choosing a simpler alternative—he would pose as a
teacher grading papers, or perhaps as a writer. Having papers in front of him would also make it possible to take notes on the events of the evening, which would make it easier to provide cleanly written reports. He’d resolutely shaken off the humiliation of the new assignment the moment he gave his coat to the hat-check girl, and as he went up the stairs to the dining room he’d found an erect bearing to accompany the swinging of his briefcase. People came to a café for enjoyment, so he had to look like he was enjoying himself.

THE SITUATION WAS CAST
in a more interesting light by the fact that along with the new post he had also finally been officially assigned to his publisher, Eesti Raamat, and an editor as well. Comrade Porkov had never taken care of the matter in spite of his promises, even though he was to get half the advance. Parts’s new supervisor hadn’t shown the slightest interest in the money, and with it Parts had finally been able to give up his post at the Norma factory guard booth. But the time freed up from his day job was spent tailing half-grown students instead of writing.

His visit to the publisher had been peculiar—the publishing director had peeped at him nervously, and kept glancing at the door. You could almost hear the padding steps of the Glavlit censors in the hallway. Parts himself had already spotted one—he recognized him by his vacant, nonchalant expression. The publisher had sat behind his desk restlessly tugging at his collar. Fear for his job was chomping at the skin of his neck. The open surveillance the man had to endure offered enough amusement to slightly ease Parts’s depression about his new assignment. No one had asked him anything about the manuscript, an envelope full of bills was silently shoved at him, and in the hallway he’d been stared at as if he were a man in the good graces of people in important places. The sweet touch of power had brushed his cheeks. He’d almost felt the admiring sigh of the Glavlit man on his skin. Maybe there was no reason to feel caught short, maybe he’d misunderstood the whole situation, maybe the Office simply considered him so multitalented that they were giving him an opportunity to shine in yet another area. In any case, getting out of the factory was certainly a plus, as was his publishing contract.

OVER THE COURSE
of the evening, however, Parts’s erect bearing started to wilt. There was no sign of the Target; nothing seemed to be happening. He laid his manuscript between the pot of coffee and the plate of chocolate truffles and started drawing sentence diagrams. At the Target’s regular table a couple of girls were discussing whether their travel permit to Saaremaa would be approved before their father, who lived there, celebrated his birthday. A flock of tech students who were friends of the girls flooded in from the stairway. The whole table ordered fifty grams of cognac and some coffee. Parts’s colleague watched the girls with hard eyes. But their faces were unknown to Parts—he hadn’t seen them in the photos he’d been shown at the safe house. The group made a restless movement. There was expectation in the air, a spirit of uneasiness; no one seemed absorbed in the conversation. One of the students was fiddling with her student ID card, another kept straightening her student cap and touching the brim. But the cognac interested all of them, as did the Valeri cookies. Then Parts noticed that one of the tech girls was wearing long pants. He wrinkled his nose and flipped through his papers, twirling his pencil, but always keeping his eye on the group, his colleague’s motionlessness, and the general goings-on in the dining room. Two men who’d settled in at the next table poured full glasses of Lõunamaine from a carafe and the drink increased the younger man’s coquetry; he nibbled on a caraway cracker, offered to share it with the older man, accomplished this by means of a complicated operation that involved first halving the cracker and then transporting it to his own mouth and from his mouth to the waiting lips of his companion. The older man lit a cigarette, the matchstick flaring up, the flame shining in his eyes. Parts could see the movements of their feet by the slight fluttering of the tablecloth. From the drift of the younger man’s legs toward the older man’s, Parts could guess how both men’s nostrils quivered suddenly, how they looked at each other, their gazes already wrapped in bedsheets. Parts squinted. All this activity had so captured his attention that he hadn’t noticed the Target coming into the dining room. Did he come in alone? How long had he been standing in the middle of Café Moskva? Parts stole a glance at the group at the
table, looking for new faces, trying to notice if anyone was missing. His colleague in the corner was looking straight at him, a smile trembling at the corners of his mouth, mockery twinkling in his eyes. Parts turned his glance back to the Target’s table, then to the dining room again. This wasn’t possible. The Target had disappeared.