When the Doves Disappeared: A Novel

  “I’ll let you go.”

  Juudit took a step into the room.

  “No one will come after you.”

  Juudit took another step.

  “You have to leave right now.”

  Hellmuth’s hand lay on the lace tablecloth. Beside it gleamed the Parabellum, well polished, ready.

  “I don’t want to leave like that,” Juudit heard her voice say, somewhere far away.

  “At this very moment the whole ring is being arrested. I won’t insult you with explanations. I’m sure you understand.”

  She took one more step. She reached a hand toward the dressing table and fumbled for the cigarette case and lighter. The flame leapt up. Roland! Had Roland been arrested, too?

  “Can I sit down?”

  Hellmuth didn’t answer. Juudit sat down. Roland was already lost. That must be how it was. A broken spring pressed against her leg. She would never fix this chair. She would never again dress in front of this table to spend an evening at the Estonia. The hatpin sweated in one hand, the cigarette trembled in the other.

  “I was given a job. I was supposed to get to know another person, not you,” Juudit said. “At Café Kultas. I was supposed to strike up a relationship with this other person. It was something that my friend’s fiancé thought of, not me. But then you were there.”

  The ash from the cigarette fell to the floor. Juudit pressed the calfskin sole of her shoe on it, then slipped her shoes off her feet and took off the bracelet Hellmuth had given her and dropped it on the dressing table. It shone like thirty pieces of silver.

  “I didn’t dare tell you. And I didn’t want to not meet you.”

  “They must have been very pleased with you. Excellent work. Congratulations.”

  Juudit got up and started taking off her dress.

  “What are you doing?” Hellmuth said.

  “This is yours.” She folded the dress carefully and laid it next to the bracelet. The splotches of sweat had spread from her sides to her back and hips. “I understand what this could mean for you,” she said.

  “Are you listening to me? They’re coming to get you right now, at any moment. You have to leave.”

  “But if I’m the only one who isn’t arrested, the others will suspect I’m a traitor.”

  “That’s not my concern. The prisoners won’t know who was arrested. They were picked up separately.”

  “Do you think they’ll believe you had nothing to do with this? That you didn’t know? Hellmuth?”

  “Don’t say my name.”

  Hellmuth looked past her. His hand was raised, his palm toward her as she tried in vain to catch his eye. He got up, took two quick steps, grabbed her by the arm, and started to push her toward the door. She resisted, wrapped her foot around the leg of the chair, clung to the door frame. Her hatpin fell on the floor. Hellmuth shoved her against the doorjamb, toward the front door, still not looking at her.

  “Come with me,” Juudit whispered. “Come with me away from here, away from everything.”

  Hellmuth didn’t answer, just pulled as she struggled, and Juudit’s feet caught on the drawing room chairs and tables and the chairs fell over, the rug buckled, the folds of the fossilized curtains fell apart, the vase fell to the floor, the ficus fell, everything fell, Juudit fell, Hellmuth fell with her, their bodies fell together and their tears carried them away.

  Vaivara, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat

  NARVA CAMP WAS the first to be evacuated; two days later, Auvere and Putki, then Viivikonna. The prisoners were all sent to Vaivara. Because of the lack of space the Vaivara children and the sick barracks were moved to Ereda, and the Viivikonna command center to Saka. Edgar ran from place to place, cursed the weather and the scarcity of the provisions, received evacuees staggering from their long journey on foot, directed the Wehrmacht trucks that brought the prisoners who were too exhausted to walk, organized more men to take care of the horses carrying the sick, sent some of those in a weakened condition to the civilian hospital, refusing to pause, to return to that desperate moment when his work detail was ordered to prepare to receive the evacuees from Narva camp. The Germans kept stubbornly repeating that this was just a temporary measure, but who could believe that? The production facilities they’d built were probably already being demolished. It was only a matter of time before the front collapsed.

  When Edgar’s courier brought his monthly order of Manon tobacco straight from the Laferme factory, Bodmann came to pick up his share and shook his head—these evacuation plans weren’t realistic. The prisoners would never be able to walk all the way to Riga. Why did they ask his opinion and then not listen to it. Edgar lay awake at night considering his options. The opportunities the camp offered in the cigarette business would soon be lost. He hadn’t been to Tallinn in months. The operation to eliminate the refugee transport ring had been successful but he didn’t even know who had been arrested. What had been a very simple plan in the beginning had proved complicated, although Auntie Anna had understood immediately that the saboteurs and army deserters who had wormed their way into the packs of refugees had to be caught or they would weaken Germany. Anna and Leonida had done their best and hadn’t revealed the true purpose of the extremely confidential plan. Juudit, on the other hand, had behaved contrary to expectations. She got angry and left, cut off contact completely. Edgar had made a mistake when he imagined that he knew his wife’s way of thinking and acting. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. In the end he thought of a solution. He sent two women pretending to be refugees, with children in tow, to the place on Roosikrantsi. They rang the doorbell when Juudit was at home and she had no choice but to let them in, then take them to the way station. Edgar had sent his man to report the address of the refugee way station to SS-Hauptsturmführer Hertz. He didn’t mention Juudit’s name. Hertz had promised to take care of the matter, after which he never contacted Edgar or came to Vaivara. He’d been transferred. The liquidation of the ring hadn’t brought Edgar the recognition he’d hoped for and his mind was plagued with forebodings—not only was all the work he’d done at Vaivara a waste of time, he had also apparently gone to a lot of trouble for nothing in his other operations as well. Now his hands were tied.

  IN MAY the Führer ordered a halt to all evacuations. The front was stable. Immediately afterward there was an order to begin construction of a new production facility. The news would have been encouraging if Edgar’s tobacco courier hadn’t told him the rest—the fighters from Tartu, who were in the thick of it, were certain that the Germans were preparing to evacuate children and women by force and send the men to the camps. Tallinn was in complete chaos. The highways were crowded with people fleeing from the city to the countryside and other people trying to make it into the city to get to the harbor. The Germans, however, were sending out propaganda supporting legal means of escape—you could go to Germany, although no one seemed to be interested in heading in that direction. The Reichsführer had pardoned all draft dodgers and any Estonians who’d fought with the Finnish forces if they returned to fight against the Bolsheviks and clear their traitorous records. Amid all this, Edgar was stuck in the Vaivara mud, but a new opportunity arose when the men from B4 came to make an inspection and told him about the problems at the Klooga camp. The laborers were already evacuated from Klooga, and because the trains were full they hadn’t been allowed to take any luggage with them, and there were heaps of their belongings on the ground that the guards were picking through like crows. The local people had seen the abandoned piles of clothes and now there was a rumor spreading that the evacuees were being drowned by the boatful, so these men had been sent to investigate what was happening at the other camps. Edgar was ordered to show them around Vaivara to prove that they didn’t have any such problems. That was when a new plan formed in his mind. Bodmann had said that Klooga had the best conditions and the highest-quality results of any camp in Estonia—the laborers were housed in stone buildings, and the food portions were sensib
le because food distribution was done through the Waffen-SS’s Truppenwirtschaftslager. The work was also cleaner—manufacturing depth charges and lumber. The most attractive aspect of Klooga, though, was that it was closer to the evacuation points in Tallinn and Saaremaa, and farther from Narva and the Soviet border. Edgar decided he had to get there. While he was giving the B4 men the tour, he offered them some tobacco and told them about his career in B4, making clear that he would happily continue working at the camp, but … He gestured at his surroundings and received knowing nods in response. They promised to get back to him. An evacuation order interrupted the tour. The order was canceled two hours later. The following weeks were equally chaotic: the commandant making telephone calls all night, one day’s instructions retracted the next, workers sometimes ordered to the harbor, sometimes to their normal work in oil production, sometimes ordered to evacuate, and Edgar finally sent to Klooga. He left his entire stash of Manon tobacco to Bodmann out of sheer relief.

  Klooga, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat

  A MACHINE GUN HAD APPEARED next to the barracks.

  Roll call.

  SS-Untersturmführer Werle strutted to the front.

  The prisoners were to be evacuated to Germany.

  SS-Hauptscharführer Dalman started calling out men who were physically strong to prepare for evacuation.

  Another roll call.

  I was used to the constant control and roll calls, but something was different this time. I recognized a few Estonians among the prisoners. Most of them were Latvian and Lithuanian Jews. I waited for my own name. It hadn’t come yet. It would soon, I was sure. Just as sure as I’d been when I got into the truck at Paterei that I was being taken away for execution. But I was alive; I’d been brought here. I peered around, looking for other Estonians from the same transport, not daring to turn my head, but I saw only three. Alfons, the mail girl’s fiancé, was still next to me. He’d been brought from Patarei, too. He’d deserted from the German army and gotten caught. My name would be called soon. I was sure it would.

  They had added new guards to the camp the day before.

  Work was interrupted. We weren’t sent to our posts, and no workers came from outside the camp, not even the Finn who sometimes gave us a little bread. Connections between the prison camps were good. Messages were hidden among the cargo sent from one camp to another. I’d even found a list of names marked with where the prisoners were from and where they’d been sent. I asked about Juudit. I’d asked about her in Patarei, too. No one had heard anything, not even our trusted Estonian guard. Maybe she’d paid her way in gold onto some ship, posing as a German. I hoped she had. Or that she’d been shot immediately.

  We were given soup at lunch. It was good, a little better than usual, and it calmed the other prisoners, but not me. The Untersturmführer walked past me talking in a loud voice, almost yelling, telling the cook to leave some soup for the three hundred who’d been taken to the woods. Said they would need it after a hard day’s work.

  The prisoners were ordered to line up again. Standing made me dizzy, although I’d just eaten.

  The gates of the camp were clogged with trucks.

  We weren’t going to get out of this alive.

  The afternoon advanced. Six men were chosen from the rows of prisoners. Two oil barrels were rolled onto a truck. The guards ordered us to sit in front of the barracks. They were restless, pale. One of them was so nervous that he couldn’t get his paperossi lit and just threw it on the ground, from where it was immediately snatched up. The guards looked more frightened than the prisoners.

  The next fifty were ordered to the front of the lines. The evacuation would be done in groups of fifty, at most a hundred at a time. Up to that point they had called only for Jews. Alfons whispered that the Estonians would soon have work to do—they would kill the Jews first, the Estonians afterward. The Germans were leaving to escort the prisoners. That was when Alfons made his move. The cook stumbled as he walked past us. The guards turned to look. The cook whimpered and rubbed his ankle. We were ordered to carry the cook and push the soup cart. The kitchen was deserted, but the cook was suddenly lying on the floor with a broken neck. The guard was still at the door, looking out at the yard. Alfons made a signal. Suddenly we were out the kitchen window, in another window, going up stairs to an attic, and from there onto a roof.

  There was a bustle at the gates. We tried to be as invisible as possible. It wasn’t difficult, we had become very thin. The guard in the kitchen doorway dashed back and forth and yelled for assistance. They were searching the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors.

  Alfons whispered, “They’ll give up soon enough. Looking for missing prisoners would arouse attention, make people restless. They’re supposed to act calm.”

  He was right. The guards left the kitchen, and the cook’s body, and went back outside. I watched them march across the yard. Suddenly I spotted a familiar profile among them, and almost fell off the roof, but managed to keep my composure and my balance.

  “Have you ever seen that man here before? Working as a guard or anything?”

  “That one?” Alfons said. “I’m not sure.”

  The prisoners were being driven toward the women’s barracks. I could see the camp barber and shoemaker. Circulating among the troops was an unmistakable figure. That bouncing walk, unlike any other.

  I was too far away to see his expression clearly, but I could tell that my cousin was not overcome by panic like the guards, not to mention the prisoners. His pulse may have been racing from excitement, but not from fear.

  He held his head high.

  Fighting had never suited him.

  Evidently this did.

  Reval, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat

  EDGAR KNOCKED ON the SS-Hauptsturmführer’s door again, harder this time. The sound echoed through the corridor. He listened. The building was still. The only sound was a dog’s bark downstairs. There wasn’t a German to be found in the Roosikrantsi neighborhood these days. The commissary doors had been torn open, the shops had been emptied, the patients had disappeared from the hospital. Edgar took a lock pick from his pocket. He’d made it himself, and it had proved very useful. The lock clicked open. The apartment was deserted, the servants gone. The living room was a mess. A dried-up ficus lay among fragments of its broken pot, the soil strewn around the room. The carpet was crumpled, the curtain torn half off its rod. Edgar glanced quickly into each room. The office cabinets were open, the drawers empty. In the bedroom he could smell Juudit’s perfume. A few dresses still hung in the wardrobe. The dressing table drawers gaped open. Empty. Kitchen cupboards, empty. Edgar checked the windows. Aside from some cracks, they were intact. There was just dust on the bureau and windowsills, no ash from a bombing. The potting soil was dry as a bone, on the cocktail cart there were glasses whose contents had evaporated, and on the smoking table an April issue of Revaler Zeitung. Edgar found a bottle of juice in the cold pantry, opened it greedily, and sat down to think. The chaos of the apartment wasn’t from the Germans’ departure. It happened longer ago than that. If Juudit was arrested, she hardly would have been allowed to pack. Had the servants emptied the apartment after she left? But why such a mess? What was the hurry? The dining chairs were gone. There were signs of more haste than in other Germans’ homes he’d seen. Had there been a fight? Was the mess the aftermath of the arrest, or something else? Had Hertz kept Juudit’s part in the ring secret, or delayed its discovery so that the spotlight wouldn’t be shone on him? Had Hertz himself been in trouble? Perhaps Juudit and her lover both were already on their way to Germany.

  When Edgar had finally gotten away from Klooga and made it to Tallinn, the city had already been emptied of Germans. His stomach had started to gnaw at him, but he didn’t let desperation get the better of him, didn’t allow himself to break down, even though he guessed that all the ships had already sailed. An Opel Blitz full of harried Germans had pulled into
Klooga the morning before the camp liquidation and disappeared the moment it was over. He should have escaped then, or spent the night with the guards who’d run away from the camp, instead of waiting for permission to get in the truck that brought the last of them to the harbor. But it was too late for regret. Everyone was gone. The Germans’ medical stores and clinics were empty, the army barber and shoemaker vanished, nothing left of the Soldatenheim but the sign, the washbasin built into the floor of the laundry on Vene Road. The Estonian flag was flying from the pole at Pikk Hermann. He had stopped to stare at it. A kid running down the street had told him that Admiral Pitka’s men were meeting to defend Estonia’s new government. “And Captain Talpak is here, too! All the good men of Estonia are arming themselves! The Russians will never get in here again!”

  He was too late. He would never get to Danzig. This was confirmed when he reached the harbor.

  THERE WAS no time to think it all through. He got up too quickly from the table and his head spun from the hunger and the vomit from the camp that clung to his boots. The smell hadn’t hit him until now. After wiping them with a dampened towel, he went into the bathroom to freshen up, without looking in the mirror. He knew himself well enough to realize that he now had the same look on his face as the other people who’d been in the truck that brought him to Tallinn. When the truck broke down, the others had turned their back on the harbor, the German army, the Germans’ orders. They started walking toward home. Edgar headed toward the harbor.

  Water still came out of the bathtub faucet and he allowed himself a quick wash, tried to shake the sleepless fog out of his brain, and went into the office. He didn’t find any valuables, no gold, no silverware. All that was left of the desk accessories were a few ink stains on a blotter. He should have acted sooner, made Juudit tell him where things were hidden, where the most important papers were, the gold and other valuables, should have arranged a time to clean out the apartment while the refugee ring was being arrested, but he’d been optimistic, naive. Too late again, even when it came to this. But this was no time to stagnate. He fetched pillowcases from the bedroom and started to fill them with the papers that were left. For a brief moment he wondered whether the Germans had left these files on purpose, and if they had, whether the files might be fakes. Could it really be that the apartment of a Hauptsturmführer working for the Sicherheitsdienst hadn’t been searched and purged, or that Hertz himself wouldn’t have taken confidential papers with him? Edgar couldn’t believe the Germans would be that careless when it came to their documents, but it didn’t matter. Papers were papers, whether they had been left there on purpose or not, and if the haul was too skimpy he could add a bit of juicy information of his own to the files. He stuffed unused forms, empty envelopes, and blank paper into the pillowcase for good measure. He found a couple of rubber stamps, too. After a moment’s thought, he packed up all the office supplies that had been left behind, including the typewriter, ribbons for it, and some unopened bottles of ink at the bottom of the desk drawer. Among the reports were some he recognized, lovingly composed by him—these he burned, along with Eggert Fürst’s identification papers, his OT-Bauführer armband, and his evacuation permit, which had a short time ago given him such great happiness. He closed the stove door with his right hand. First he would hide the treasure he’d found. He had to manage it even though the pillowcases were heavy, had to get back to Klooga quickly, so he could look through the piles of clothing for something that fit and let the Bolsheviks find him there, Edgar Parts, a prisoner made to witness horrors, but rescued in the nick of time by the Red Army.