As Ingel dribbled tears of joy, Aliide thought about how they were going to hide him. Hans whispered that he had run away from the German ranks and made it across the gulf by passing as a Finn. Ingel sniffled that Hans could have tried to send them a letter of some kind, but Aliide was glad he hadn’t. The fewer of his activities put down on paper the better. His escape with the Finland boys could be wiped from memory immediately; it never happened—surely Ingel understood that? What about the little room behind the kitchen—could they use that as a hiding place again? That’s where Hans had been before, when the Russians came the first time. It was a good spot—windowless—so they hid him there, but after the very first night his restlessness started to grow and he started asking about the Forest Brothers. The inactivity struck at his manhood, and he wanted to at least help with the work around the household. It was haymaking time; there were other men in hiding who were in the fields wearing skirts as a disguise, but Ingel didn’t dare allow him to do it. No one must know that he had returned, and that was made clear to Linda, too.
A couple of days later their neighbor Aino, recently widowed and in the last stages of pregnancy, ran over the field holding her belly, collapsed next to Ingel’s rake, and told them that the Berg boys were on their way there; they had marched past her house resolutely, and the youngest one was waving the blue, black, and white flag. Ingel and Aliide left the haymaking right where it was and rushed home. The Berg boys were waiting in the yard, smoking paperossis. They greeted the women.
“Have you seen Hans?”
“Why do you ask?”
Ingel and Aliide stood side by side in front of the boys and gripped each other’s fingers.
“Hans hasn’t come home since he went wherever he went.”
“But he’ll be here before long.”
“We don’t know anything about that.”
The Berg boys told them to give Hans their greetings and tell him they were forming a group and he’d best seek them out. Ingel gave them some bread and three liters of milk and promised to pass along their message. But after the boys had disappeared behind the silver willows, Ingel whispered that they must never tell Hans. He would go running after them! Aliide ignored her sniveling and said that they could expect to hear the rattle of the secret police motorcycles directly, because this march was the most conspicuous activity imaginable; didn’t Ingel understand that? They acted quickly. When the clock next struck the hour, Hans was already hiding at the edge of the woods. Lipsi started to bark in the yard, and the sound of a motorcycle could be heard approaching. Aliide and Ingel stared at each other. Hans had made it to safety at the last moment, but what if they were sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of haymaking—it would look exactly like what it was. Like something had happened and now they were just sitting there waiting to feel a gun at the back of their heads. Back to the fields then. They went through the pantry to the cowshed, through the cowshed to the stable, and from the stable through the rustling leaves in the tobacco patch to the field, as the motorcycle swung into the yard, its sidecar bouncing. “We left the kettle on the stove,” Ingel panted. “They’ll know that someone has just left the house.” They hadn’t locked the front door; it would have seemed suspicious. The Chekists would be there any moment and hear the clatter of the eggs boiling on the stove for Hans’s lunch, and they would know that someone had left the kitchen in a hurry. The two women stood in the middle of the field, peering at the house from behind a pile of stones. The men in their leather coats stopped their motorcycles, went inside, stayed there for a moment, came out, looked around, and drove away. Ingel was surprised that they left so quickly and immediately started to regret letting Hans go off into the woods just like that. Maybe they could have got out of it by talking to the Chekists. If they had been at home, the men might have just popped into the kitchen and left again, and Hans could have stayed safe in the little room behind the kitchen. What a stupid girl. Aliide didn’t understand how Hans could have chosen a woman like her.
“We have to get organized.”
“How?”
“Leave it to me.”
Ingel cried at night and Aliide stayed up thinking about their options. She couldn’t expect anything sensible from Ingel— she didn’t even notice the mold on the bread as she offered it to Linda, didn’t recognize familiar people. While Ingel hung the laundry to dry in the rain and murmured her prayers, Aliide was thinking. If Hans was going to survive, they would have to wash him clean of his activities with the civil guard, the Omakaitse self-defense league, and the Riigikogu, and the war in Finland. They couldn’t talk their way out of it, and escape was no longer possible.
Even Hans’s old confirmation classmate Theodor Kruus had cleared up his part in the anti-Soviet leaflets, but Aliide knew at what cost. Ingel didn’t know, and it was best that she didn’t.
The village militia liked to get young flesh and rosy cheeks into its jiggling belly. The younger the better. The greater the crimes of the parents, the younger the girl could be, or the more nights it would take to expiate the crime—one night, or one maidenhead, wasn’t enough. Theodor Kruus was let go because his lovely daughter redeemed him by going to the militia at night, taking off her dress and stockings, and kneeling before them. Theodor Kruus’s record as an agitator disappeared, the leaflets he wrote and his other anti-Soviet activities were placed under someone else’s name, and that someone else got ten years in the mines and five years of exile. Hans’s activities were punishable by death, or years in Siberia, at the very least.
Did Theodor know what his daughter had done? Maybe the militia told him. Aliide could easily imagine the booted militiamen with their legs spread wide, coming to whisper about it in Theodor’s ear.
Ingel wouldn’t be able to do it—all she could do was sniffle, with her nose against the rya rug on the wall. And Ingel wasn’t young enough for the militia anymore. Neither was Aliide. They only wanted girls who weren’t yet women. Besides, Aliide couldn’t do it—or could she? She lay awake till there were circles under her eyes, and there was no one she could ask what to do or how to do it.
After endless hours awake, Aliide thought of curtains. She had stared and stared at the black night, the moon, the moonlessness, the moon waxing and waning, and with it the passing of time. She had stayed awake and longed for her mother, whom she could have asked for advice, longed for her father, who would have known what to do, for anyone who would have known what to tell her. She wanted her sleep back, and Hans home, and the obtrusive moon away from her window. As she thought of these things, she realized that they had to make some curtains. Ingel took to the idea immediately. Hans could spend some time in the kitchen if they had curtains. It was so simple. So crazy. And the two sisters did seem crazy as Aliide beat out new fabric on the loom and Ingel decorated it with embroidery, even though they needed the thread for other things. Their foolishness was dismissed in the village with the explanation that the war had addled their brains, and that suited them fine. Aliide told Ingel to explain that she was throwing herself into her handiwork because concentrating on the needle and thread relieved her sadness and helped her to stop crying so much. On Aliide’s orders she also chatted in the village about a cousin in Tallinn who had told them that full-length curtains were the fashion in Paris and London. This cousin had shown them foreign fashion magazines, and there were no half curtains like there were in the countryside here—those were hopelessly old-fashioned! Aliide sometimes felt that when they explained their curtains, people looked at the sisters the way you look at someone you know is lying, but no one said anything—they let it be, acted like they believed, which made Aliide explain twice as hard how they should try to be as genteel as they could at a time like this, even be silly about it, that even if you did live in the country, you could still follow urban trends, even in times like these. Aliide proclaimed herself a woman of a new era who wanted curtains of a new era—the first full-length curtains in the village.
They got in the habit o
f closing the curtains almost every evening. Sometimes they didn’t do it, so that people walking by the yard could see that life went on as usual in the house, that they had nothing to hide.
The others started to put curtains on their windows, too, to ward off spies—half curtains, true, but they still prevented people from seeing what was happening inside. Many of them doubtless understood why Ingel and Aliide had chosen fulllength curtains, but those who did kept their mouths shut.
After opening and closing the drapes for a couple of months, the sisters decided that it would be best to keep Hans in the house all the time. They could dig a place out under the floor in the little room behind the kitchen, or they could build a room between the little room and the kitchen. Would that work? It was warm enough, close to them, and they would be able to let visitors into the rest of the house without worrying. The little room off the kitchen had always served as a storeroom and guest room—few people from the village had ever been in it, and the door was always kept closed. It didn’t even have a latch or a handle; just a hook. And who was going to remember what size it was originally? There was no window in the room, so it was always dim. It was time to summon Hans home from the woods—he was needed to help with building.
There were some boards in the stable; they carried them in unnoticed, through the drying barn and the food pantry. They worked on the wall only on the most windy or rainy days, when the weather would muffle the pounding of the hammer, and only when Linda was with Aliide or Ingel in the barn or someplace else, because a child’s mouth is a child’s mouth. They wouldn’t tell Linda what they were up to; she could be told stories about the ghost in that little room. When Hans had withdrawn into the secret room, he came into the kitchen or bath only when Linda was away or asleep. If she woke up in the night and came into the kitchen, they told her that Daddy had just come from the forest to visit.
First one board, then another; the safe room was coming along nicely. Ingel laughed, Aliide smiled, and there was a cheerful note in Hans’s humming. The molding from the old ceiling and baseboards was taken off and attached to the new wall. Sufficient ventilation was added; the ceiling had a pipe that drew air from the attic. Ingel found an old roll of the wallpaper that had been used in the little room, and when she had pasted it in place no one would have guessed that there was a good-sized room behind the wall. Hans put the cupboard that had been against the old wall up against the new one and concealed the new wallpaper so that its slightly lighter color and smoother texture wouldn’t be noticed. The door to the room was behind the cupboard. They put a bucket in the corner of the secret room, for when he needed it, but then they decided that they should put a hole in the floor so he could put the bucket under it with a lid on it. Or maybe they could make a hole in the wall that the little room shared with the barn. It could serve as a kind of latrine in case they had to be away from the house unexpectedly.
It was evening; Hans took a bath and ate heartily. Ingel packed his knapsack and told Linda that Daddy had to go away again now, but he would be back soon. Very soon. Linda started to cry and Hans consoled her. She had to be a brave girl now. So Daddy would be proud of his Estonian daughter.
All three of them went with him to the barn door and stood watching as he disappeared into the woods. The next night Hans came back and moved into the little room. A couple of days later, news of Hans Pekk’s gruesome end on the forest road spread through the village.
1946
Läänemaa, Estonian Soviet
Socialist Republic
Are You Sure, Comrade Aliide?
The first time Ingel and Aliide were taken into the town hall for questioning, the man who greeted them offered apologies if his underlings had behaved rudely when bringing the two of them in. “My dear comrades, they have no manners.”
Ingel was taken into one room, Aliide into another. The man opened the door for her, offered her a chair, and urged her to be seated.
“First I’ll just go over some of your paperwork. Then we can begin.”
He leafed through his papers. The clock ticked. Men went up and down the hallway. Aliide could feel their footsteps on the soles of her feet. The floor trembled. She concentrated on staring at the door frame. It seemed to move. The cracks between the tiles on the floor swayed like a spider’s legs. The hands of the clock bit off a new hour, and the man just kept flipping through his papers. Another hour began. The man glanced at Aliide and gave her a friendly smile. Then he got up, told her he was sorry but he had to attend to a certain matter and would be back in no time and then they could begin right away. He disappeared into the hallway. The third hour began. And the fourth. Aliide got up from her chair and went to the door. She tried the handle; the door opened. A man was standing outside the door; she closed it and went back to her chair. Linda had been playing at Aino’s when the men came for them. Aino must be wondering where they were.
The door opened.
“Now we can begin. Where were you going just now? Let’s clear that up first.”
“I was looking for the powder room.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Would you like to use the restroom now?”
“No, thank you.”
“Are you sure?”
Aliide nodded. The man lit a paperossi and started by asking if she could tell them the whereabouts of Hans Pekk. Aliide replied that Hans had died a long time ago. A murderrobbery. The man asked her this and that about Hans’s death, and then he said, “But all joking aside, are you sure, Comrade Aliide, that Hans Pekk wouldn’t tell us your location, if he were in your position?”
“Hans Pekk is dead.”
“Are you sure, Comrade Aliide, that your sister isn’t, at this very moment, telling us, for example, that the two of you have fabricated a story about Hans Pekk’s death, and that everything you are saying is a lie?”
“Hans Pekk is dead.”
“Comrade, your sister doesn’t want to be taken to court or to jail—I’m sure you’re aware of that?”
“My sister wouldn’t tell such lies.”
“Are you sure, Comrade Aliide?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure that Hans Pekk won’t tell us the names of the people who have assisted him in his crimes and deceptions? Are you sure that Hans Pekk won’t mention your name among them? I’m only thinking of what’s best for you, Comrade Aliide. I would be more than happy to believe that such a beautiful young woman wouldn’t have ended up in this kind of trouble if she hadn’t been deceived into giving assistance to a criminal. A criminal so skillful at deception that he had completely turned a young girl’s head. Comrade Aliide, be sensible. I beg you, save yourself.”
“Hans Pekk is dead.”
“Show us his body and we won’t have to discuss the matter any further! Comrade Aliide, you will have only yourself to blame if you get into trouble for the sake of this Hans Pekk. Or his wife. I’ve done all I can to ensure that a beauty like you can go on with her life as normal—there’s nothing more I can do. Help me, so that I can help you.”
The man took hold of her hand and squeezed it.
“I only want what’s best for you. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
Aliide wrenched her hand away.
“Hans Pekk is dead!”
“Perhaps that will be enough for today. We’ll meet again, Comrade Aliide.”
He opened the door for her and wished her a good night.
***
Ingel was waiting outside. They left together on foot, silent. It wasn’t until Aino’s house loomed into view that Ingel cleared her throat.
“What did they ask you?”
“They asked about Hans. I didn’t tell them anything.”
“Neither did I.”
“What else did they say? What did they ask you?”
“Nothing else.”
“Me either.”
“What should we tell Hans? And Aino?”
“We should say that they asked about something else. And that we
didn’t give them any information about anybody.”
“What if Hendrik Ristla talks?”
“He won’t talk.”
“How can we be sure?”
“Hans said that Hendrik Ristla was the only person he trusted enough to help us with our story.”
“What if Linda talks?”
“Linda knows that her father really did die, not just for pretend.”
“But they’ll come to question us again.”
“We came out all right this time, didn’t we? We’ll come out all right next time.”
1947
Läänemaa, Estonian Soviet
Socialist Republic
Aliide Is Going to Need a Cigarette