An odd silence had fallen. It was as if even the snowflakes stopped in midair.
“Are you a ghost?” asked the old woman.
“No,” said Anna. She took half a step toward the old woman and held her arms out like you do when you want to embrace someone. She wasn’t planning to embrace the Witch, was she?
“Stand still.”
Anna stopped. She understands Ukrainian, thought Natasha. She doesn’t usually. But when Anna began to speak again, it was in Ukrainian.
“They thought I would die,” she said. “But I survived. And that wasn’t so good, because by then the trial was already over, and the
murderers condemned.”
“I think you
are
a ghost,” said the Witch. “How otherwise could I have stood by your grave?”
“It wasn’t my fault. Semienova … They couldn’t admit that a mistake had been made. Semienova had me placed with a family in Galicia, with the brother of an aunt of hers. Pötsch, they were called. They were ethnic Germans. And later … later it was easier to pretend that I was German too, otherwise I would have been sent back to Stalin.”
“And so what? You were a hero, right? The people’s nightingale?” The Witch spat out the last two words as if they hurt her mouth.
Anna stood still. Her face had transformed as her language had changed. There was an expression now that Natasha had never seen on a Dane. The unmoving mouth, the eyes that slid to the side … No, you couldn’t break it into parts. It was just Ukrainian. If Anna had ever looked at Natasha with that expression, Natasha would have known right away that she wasn’t born in Bacon Land.
“A dead nightingale,” she said. “A dead hero. Who was still alive. How long do you think it would have been before they corrected that mistake? They had shot Grachev and Grandfather and Grandmother Trofimenko and … all of them. For my murder. If you have a murder trial, you also need a corpse.”
“Kolja was dead. But maybe he doesn’t count?
He
didn’t get a statue, you know.”
“Olga …”
The Witch laughed. A laughter without much sound, just a series of short hisses. “Olga? It has certainly been a long time. Several names ago. They are used up so quickly, it seems to me.”
She began to cock the gun with shaking but competent hands.
“Are you going to shoot me?” asked Anna.
“Why not?”
“Haven’t we lost enough? Olga, we are the only ones, the only ones who are left.”
“So perhaps that was why you thought you had the right to bleed me for money? You milked me like one milks a cow.”
“That wasn’t me. It was Pavel. I shouldn’t have told him as much as I did.”
“No, you probably shouldn’t have. Sister.”
The Witch completed her gesture. Natasha could hear the small click as yet another projectile shot forward in the gun’s chamber. Katerina stirred in her arms and made a tiny, sleepy sound.
Natasha knew that she wouldn’t have more than this one chance. She was barely able to make herself let go of Katerina. But she did it. She placed her little girl softly in the snow and silently promised that she would return very soon. As soon as she was done.
She actually didn’t much care right now if the Witch shot Anna. Because now she knew that it was Anna who had brought the Witch into their lives. All that time when she thought it was just Pavel’s stupidity, Pavel’s greed … It was Anna’s too. That much she had understood. Because she had also watched Anna become wealthier. Had seen how there was money for a new kitchen, for the newly thatched roof, not just on the main house but also in the wing where Kirsten was going to live. She crept closer to the spot where Anna had dropped her flashlight.
“Olga, don’t do it!” said Anna. It was clear she hadn’t spoken Ukrainian for a long, long time. She sounded like someone in an old film.
“It’s not a crime to shoot someone who is already dead,” said the Witch. And at that moment, Natasha struck and felt the blow hit home, in spite of the fur hat, all the way to the frail, old eggshell skull.
The Witch fell forward, almost disappearing into the snowdrift by
the gable. Natasha kneeled beside her and raised the flashlight again just to make sure.
This time no Jurij came to stop her.
Anna stood in the middle of the yard with a peculiar look on her face. At her feet crouched the dog, which had finally stopped howling. Nina didn’t know if it was because it was feeling better or worse, but it wasn’t dead yet.
“A syringe,” she said to Anna. “Do you have one?”
Anna stared at her as if she had fallen from another planet. “Why would I have that?” she asked.
“Because I need one!”
“I don’t.”
“Something else. Some kind of tube. A pen.”
Anna Olesen just shook her head, and Nina gave up on getting anything useful out of her. She ran up the stairs and into the house. The boiler room. A toolbox? Not a lot of slender tubes in there. The kitchen … She needed a knife in any case. Maybe there was a pen too.
She opened cabinets and tore out drawers and barely registered that there was already a mess that hadn’t been there when they had gone out to look for Rina. Knives. Yes. Sharp enough to pierce the wall of the chest, though that in itself would not create a passage. She chose a slender, very sharp fillet knife with a patterned hilt. The blade was twelve to thirteen centimeters long—that had to be enough. The next drawer was full of spice glasses and
completely useless. The next drawer … baking paper, tinfoil, plastic containers … Wasn’t there a damned pen anywhere?
She looked around wildly. The seconds were passing. Her well-trained sense of time could feel them like an extra pulse, tick, tick, tick.
On the refrigerator hung a pad with a magnet and a pen on a string. Nina tore it down and took it apart with quick, sure hands. Out with the tip and the cartridge—it was only the hollow plastic part that she needed. She had her tube and her knife.
H
E WAS STILL
breathing—much, much too fast, and his gaze was hazier than it had been.
“Hurry,” said the man who had been shot in the thigh. As if that wasn’t what Nina was already doing.
She tore open the jacket and the shirt beneath it, drew a mental line from the nipple to the armpit and jabbed the knife in between the fourth and the fifth rib. It required more strength than she had anticipated. The muscles lay like tough, flat cables across the chest, and she needed to get past them and to the lung membrane—six, maybe seven centimeters. Thank God it was on the right so she didn’t need to worry about the heart.
The thigh-shot man exclaimed, most likely something to the tune of, “What the hell are you doing?” She ignored him. When she pulled out the knife, there was a groaning sound of air being let loose, but only momentarily. She forced the sharp end of the pen through the cut she had made and sent a prayer to gods she didn’t believe in.
Let it work.
If her hopelessly improvised procedure worked, the air that was now trapped between the lung membranes would be released. The lung would have room to expand again, and Søren would be able to breathe.
She hadn’t looked at his face at all while she did it. She had sensed his reaction to the pain, but only distantly. It had been necessary to think of his body as something mechanical, a question of tissue, anatomy and function. That perspective collapsed more quickly than his lung had when she met his gaze. It was darker than usual but already less hazy. He still needed proper drainage, oxygen and so on, and somewhere inside him was a projectile that would need to be removed. Lying on the cold ground wasn’t helping him either, but right now it was too risky to move him. She had bought time; that was what was most important. Enough time, she thought.
She felt a jab in her left lower arm, and only then did she realize that she had been using it without even feeling the fracture.
She turned to the guy with the thigh wound, but he quickly held up a hand in front of himself. “Okay,” he said. “I’m okay.” He obviously had no wish for a taste of the Borg version of first aid.
The snow crunched. When Nina turned, she saw Natasha standing by the black BMW. Her face was so damaged that Nina only recognized her because she had Rina in her arms.
Rina. The pills. Rina.
She started to get up.
“Don’t try,” said Natasha. “Don’t try to stop me.” She opened the back door and carefully set Rina down on the seat.
“Natasha, Rina needs to go to the hospital.” Nina got up, took the first step. “She has had an overdose of diazepam. Valium. She needs to be under observation; you can’t …”
Natasha turned around and hit her straight across the mouth, a blow that hammered Nina’s lips against her teeth and made her neck snap back with a whiplash jerk.
“You said, ‘I’ll take care.’ You said, ‘like my own child.’ But you don’t even know her right name. KA-TE-RI-NA. And you didn’t take care.”
“She needs treatment,” Nina said. She felt the blood run down her chin on the outside and pool behind her teeth on the inside of her mouth. “Natasha, you’re risking her life. She needs to be in a hospital.”
Natasha shook her head stubbornly. She shoved Nina aside and went over to the third man, the one who lay on his stomach in the snow and hadn’t moved at any point, even though she could hear him breathing fairly normally. Natasha rolled him onto his back. Then she kicked him in the face hard. She stuck her hands into the pockets of his overcoat and fished out a set of car keys and a wallet. A pair of black cable strips followed, but those she threw aside in the snow. She sent Nina a furious black look.
“All the time, you think, poor little Natasha, she can do nothing, she is so stupid. Poor, stupid Natasha. Beautiful and stupid, and people do what they like with her. But I’m not stupid. Katerina is
my
child.
I’ll
take care now. You lose your children, but you can’t take mine.”
She got behind the wheel of the big BMW and drove away.
N
INA SANK TO
the ground next to Søren. The blood from her split lip dripped into the snow, dot, dot, dot, like the first third of a Morse code emergency signal. She observed it without emotion.
So much for Nina Borg, World Savior, she said to herself. That was that. Soon there’d be nothing left but the T-shirt. If there was one thing Natasha had managed to knock into her head with that blow, it was that she hadn’t saved anyone from anything, and that there was, in fact, no one right now who wished to be saved by her. Rina was gone. Katerina, she corrected herself. You are a shitty mother even to children who don’t belong to you. And flying conditions are still lousy. No help from above would be forthcoming.
She felt a hand on her ankle. It was Søren.
“Are you … okay?” he asked. The pause was the result of not being able to finish a whole sentence in one breath.
She looked down at him. His color was better, the lips a little less blue. He still had a hole in his lung. It was at once laughable and unbelievably touching that he was asking if
she
was okay.
She placed her hand on top of his. A little too cold, she noted, still in mild shock.
“I’m a hell of a lot healthier than you are,” she said.
UKRAINE, 1935
“Eat!”
The lady at the end of the barrack stood with her arms folded behind her back, her eyes raking down the bench rows, and even though Olga hadn’t been in the dining hall before, she immediately knew what was expected of her, and what the consequences would be if she refused. She could see it in the other children’s faces; they had odd, rigid eyes and didn’t look up or to the side, and she knew it from the two other orphanages she had stayed in over the course of the late summer.
What was expected of her was obedience. Nothing else. The consequences if she refused would target her body first. There would be locked doors, darkness, heat, beatings, hunger or thirst. But they might also be accompanied by humiliation. The recitation of Father’s crimes against the Soviet state, or even worse, the story of Father’s death on the pole where he had “howled like a dog.” All the children around her were orphans like her. Children of class enemies, of the deported or just of parents who had fallen victim to hunger in the great hunger year. Still, the shame burned in her cheeks when the orphanage lady talked about her father. As if the very way that he had died was more undignified than everything else. Up against a pole. Howling like a dog. Thin and bony and beaten and toothless.
Olga shrank down over her plate and stared into the whitish-yellow
mass of overcooked potatoes. The soup was covered in flies, which moved only lazily and unwillingly when she pushed at the spoon. Some remained lying there belly-up on the sticky surface, legs kicking. Olga was hungry after the trip from the station to what was called Lenin’s Orphanage Nr. 4. She was someplace near a town called Odessa, she knew, but the orphanage was a lonely and windswept building stuck in the middle of the steppe, and even though there was now a touch of fall in the air, the midday heat was indescribable.
“Eat.”
A sharp elbow poked her in the side, and she glanced at the girl who sat on her right, shoveling down her soup, quickly but at the same time carefully so not a drop was lost between plate and mouth. A pair of buzzing flies that were trapped in the sticky mass went right down the hatch too without the girl taking any notice.
“Eat it or let me have it,” she whispered, looking impatiently at Olga. “The food will be cleared away in five minutes.”
Olga’s stomach growled a warning, unwilling to accept her indecisiveness, and she breathed deeply. She scraped some of the wriggling flies off the soup and brushed them off the spoon with her index finger. The first spoonful was the worst, but afterward it went pretty well. She took a mouthful and let it glide down her throat in one rapid movement, so that she didn’t have time to either taste or feel it in her throat. Her benchmate followed her spoon with hungry eyes, but when Olga had scraped her plate completely clean, the girl took the time to examine Olga.