When the Doves Disappeared (41 page)

He went back to the material his informant had given him, trying again to find repeated words, signs of a code. Frustration was unavoidable, the stupid girl’s stupid words might be just stupid words. He bit off a sprat’s head and sucked on it for a moment, deep in thought. Just as he was starting to feel angry, his eye fell on the piece of blotting paper he’d found in the envelope, folded over some dried flowers. There was writing on it in rose-colored ink. A name. Dolores Vaik. For a moment
Parts thought he was dreaming. But he was awake. He snapped up the card. The sender’s name was Marta Kask. Parts heard his own heavy sigh from far away. Spit collected in his mouth. Dolores Vaik’s daughter’s name was Marta. He slowly put the piece of blotting paper, the birthday card, and the envelope down in front of him, and formed the connections, very slowly, in his mind: The Target’s fiancée was in the country, at her parents’ house. She’d written the letter from the country, used a piece of blotting paper that another woman, Dolores Vaik, or someone who’d written “Dolores Vaik,” had used. It was most likely Vaik herself. Judging from Evelin Kask’s letter, Dolores Vaik lived at Marta Kask’s house. Mrs. Vaik’s daughter’s name was Marta. And Marta Kask’s daughter seemed to be the Target’s fiancée. Had the Office purposely placed the Target’s fiancée in his path? Was that what this was all about? Had they done it because they knew that he knew Marta and Mrs. Vaik? Too complicated. That couldn’t be it. It was too improbable. How would the Office know they were acquaintances of his, and if they did, why would they care? And yet there was some sense in it. Mrs. Vaik had stayed in Estonia when Lydia Bartels left with the Germans. She’d worked as a veterinarian’s receptionist and she’d participated in illegal activities—Parts knew that. She must have been observed at some point, particularly since she had a contact in Germany, or because of the illegals and emigrants, or because she knew too many people compromised by antigovernment activities. But why would the Office feed Parts the close relative of such a person? Was it about Parts himself? Were they trying some new, preemptive method on him? Remarkable. Really remarkable.

Parts remembered Marta Kask well. When Mrs. Vaik was widowed, she and Marta had supported themselves by helping Lydia Bartels with her sessions. Parts had often sat in Bartels’s kitchen waiting for Germans who had insisted on coming to one of her séances. Marta had offered him and the driver something to eat, the Germans had winked at her as they left, and she’d flicked her wheat-colored hair and fended off their approaches. There was continual traffic at those sessions—Bartels had been the favorite of the spiritism enthusiasts among the officers.

Parts hardly noticed the renewed stomping upstairs. He tried to think of counterarguments, tried to find reasons why the connection was a
coincidence. He had to get more information about Mrs. Vaik and Marta, more recent information. That was where the answer would be. He tried to calm his imagination. This was no time for fantasies.

Karl Andrusson. The ads Parts had placed in
Kodumaa
had borne fruit. He had recently received a letter from Karl, in an envelope with Canadian stamps on it. Karl had expressed his gratitude that Mrs. Vaik had taken such good care of his foot. If it weren’t for her, his flying career would have been over.

Parts threw open his box of letters and took out the Canadian bundle. Karl always stuck a lot of stamps on the envelope because he knew how valuable they were in philatelic circles.

Comrade Parts dipped his pen in the inkwell.

Tooru Village, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

E
VELIN’S FATHER LAY
on the autumn grass, drooling from the side of his mouth. He had a pistol in his pants pocket. Evelin knew that. She let him be and stepped over the timber of the threshold onto the covered porch. He wouldn’t use the gun, not really. The dog, who had waited for her at the bus stop, slipped past her feet into the kitchen. Her mother hurried to greet her, her grandmother followed, warmth steamed from the kitchen, and she was inside, suddenly inside, and grain coffee was rushed to the table, and fresh sweet rolls, and the coal hook clattered, and the aroma of manna pudding reached her over all the other smells as her mother took it out of the oven and pressed her for news. Evelin led the conversation to village happenings. She didn’t want her mother to ask about Rein. Luckily her mother got carried away talking about their neighbor Liisa, who had received a letter from her son in Australia, although she’d been sure he was dead, hadn’t heard anything from him in twenty years, and then she gets a letter! He sent her a chiffon scarf with it and said he would send more, he knew you could get good money for them here, and they were easy to send, and Liisa was so proud, dizzy with happiness, had been talking about it for weeks, saying My son is alive, as if it couldn’t be true, as if it were all a dream. Evelin pretended to listen,
let her mother ramble, her grandmother carding wool, Evelin putting in a noise now and then, thinking all the while about Rein and tugging on the curls at the back of her neck. Her mother, father, and grandparents all had straight hair. Her father’s was straight as a horse’s mane. Why did she have to end up with curly hair? The girl with the white legs had hair that was pale and soft. Evelin was sure Rein liked that look better.

After the evening at the Moskva they’d hardly seen each other. Rein had told her she was a coward, teased her at first for how alarmed she’d been, then reassured her that there was nothing to be afraid of, everything was all right. But it wasn’t. Rein hadn’t invited her again to the café or the house where the man with the spectacles lived. The visit to her parents’ house had been postponed, he had so much to do. It had been a relief. When she’d come back to town at the beginning of autumn, the bustle of activity at the Moskva had diminished, it was almost like it had never happened, and Rein hadn’t forgotten her over the summer. He’d taken her out to the movies and dancing right away. But he smelled like vodka and smoked eel from the night before. She could tell what company he’d been keeping and she couldn’t refuse when he started to prod her again about when he could come and meet her parents. Maybe at Christmas—which would mean preparing herself for it all over again. The old terror came back. How could she bring Rein here?

“We’re beating the flax tomorrow,” her mother said. “Liisa said she would give us a hand. Come help me with your father. We should get him indoors.”

“Let him lie there. Are they paying him in liquor again? Has the roof been fixed yet?”

“Don’t start, Evelin.”

Soon they would have the Christmas butchering to do, and in the meantime all the autumn chores. There weren’t enough working-age men in the village. Her father did it all, got paid in good old Estonian vodka, and stayed well into the night at the Party boss’s wife’s house, always working on something that needed fixing, whenever her husband was out. He always came home drunk. Her father would get Rein drinking, and then what would happen? She could already hear the excruciating dinners they would have—Dad drunk, Mom prattling on about calves and flax and Evelin’s favorite lamb from childhood, about how she
had always wanted to watch as the water started to bubble around the flax when they soaked it in the lake. Evelin glanced at her grandmother carding in the corner. Where would they put her while Rein was visiting? They couldn’t send her away at Christmastime. Evelin had heard her father talking about how her grandmother shouldn’t travel anymore, and for once Evelin agreed with him. If her parents came to Tallinn and met Rein, maybe he would stop pestering her about coming here. But they couldn’t leave the animals and the house unattended—the village was full of thieves. Would Rein be satisfied if only her mother came, so her father could take care of the calves and chickens while she was away? Evelin would bring it up as soon as there was an opportune moment. But she didn’t want to talk about Rein right now. What if someone found out what he was involved in? If he got thrown out of the university, he would end up in the army and be gone for years. Did he even realize that? How could he be so reckless? So selfish? How would they ever have their own sheets, their cactuses on the windowsill, their cabinet polished to a shine? What if he was involved with something that could end him up in prison? She couldn’t see herself waiting for him outside the walls of the Patarei, or running to buy him bottles of Vana Tallinn, sending it to wherever the army posted him. She remembered a classmate who’d come home in a zinc box after he failed his exams twice and didn’t go to the commission interview and then was sent into the army. Rein was crazy, playing a crazy game.

Evelin had made the wrong choice. She should have paid more attention to that Polish tech student who wanted a wife from Estonia and said so outright. He studied hard, but he wasn’t like Rein, who refused to call Victory Square Victory Square because he didn’t want to use the name the communists gave it. Or she should have gone out with that Siberian boy during her first year. He had asked her to the dance, but she didn’t go, she had her eye on the upperclassmen just like the other freshman girls, thinking they were wiser, thinking he was immature, the way he would always say in the middle of a nice evening that he just wanted to go to sleep between clean, white sheets, nothing more. Clean, white sheets were enough for him, but not for Evelin, and now look where her greed had gotten her.

Her mother coughed and held her side. It was getting better, her
cough, the too-deep wheeze of her breathing. Evelin said she would do all the barn work that weekend, but her mother said no, her studies were more important, and her father thought so, too. Nothing was more important than Evelin getting out of the kolkhoz, and once the flax was retted she was going to make Evelin a new sweater that would be good to read in, would keep her warm even in the winter. She would leave the sleeves long and wide like Evelin had asked her to, although Evelin hadn’t told her why she wanted them that way—to hide her cheat sheets. The summer exams had gone well, even the orals. Her scores in Party History and Industrial Intensification and Efficiency were high. She’d had a chance to look through all eighty of the professor’s questions and had made crib sheets for herself and Rein. Sometimes she’d gone to the countryside to study and when she got back to town she sat in Glehn Park day after day cramming for the tests. The park was plagued by exhibitionists and rowdy gangs of kids and couples necking. She wasn’t the only one they were bothering—other lone women had gathered on the bench next to the artificial pond to read and bask in the sun. She’d gotten to know one of them, a woman who’d once given her half of the orange in her lunch. The woman had even helped drill her on Marx. It was more fun that way; it kept her alert. She’d also given Evelin tips about hairdressers who were particularly good at blow-drying curly hair, laughed and said she was no stranger to untamable hair. But eventually her presence had become oppressive. She was too curious for a complete stranger. Evelin stopped studying in Glehn Park and never tried the hairdresser the woman recommended, though she’d seen how Rein stared at the white-legged girl’s flowing tresses.

After the summer exams Evelin crammed for fall-term chemistry and physics to ease herself into the change of subjects. Office technology and touch-typing went well, but you didn’t get a grade in your study book for those. Next came more exams in Party History, Problems in Economic Analysis, and Problems in Analytical Methodology. She needed to find a good place to study for the exams in January, and was already worried about it. The library put her to sleep, it was too noisy in the dorms, and she couldn’t go outside in the winter. Maybe she should switch to a more interesting subject. Highways? Surveying? Social sciences were out—no more Marx for her. She had other options, but Rein was more
of a worry. He didn’t care if there wasn’t a place to study. Passing calculus and programming was no problem. ALGOL programming was easy for him—the final exam consisted of simply solving some task on the computer—but he wasn’t going to pass the orals. On the other hand, his parents had money, otherwise he never would have passed his previous courses. He spent the fall planning a student demonstration, and he’d started to talk to Evelin about it, warily.