When the Doves Disappeared: A Novel

  THEY HAD COME into the bespectacled man’s house through the back door. They’d made their way there by a meandering path between apartment houses, onto a big road, and into a thicket, Rein pulling her along through the bushes and across the backyard of another house. When they arrived, Rein had pulled a few twigs out of her hair and patted her on her tousled head. Her stockings were still intact, and her heart was light. Rein knocked a rhythm on the gray door, and while they waited for it to open Evelin watched the neighbors. A woman was carrying heavy water pails on her shoulders, gauze diapers fluttering on the clothesline behind her like winding sheets. The woman emptied the buckets into a tub and went back to get more water. Farther off someone was sharpening a scythe. Evelin remembered a girl who had been thrown out of the dorms and how the roommate with the white legs had laughed, saying that only stupid girls got into that kind of trouble. Evelin didn’t want to be among the stupid; she didn’t want to be ruined, to sully herself, even if Rein claimed that such a thing couldn’t ruin you. It certainly could, Evelin knew that, and it made her nervous every time they met. She couldn’t explain interrupting her studies to her parents. Their permit to raise calves, along with her stipend, ensured that they would have enough money for her studies, but it meant that her mother had to take care of the calves on top of her kolkhoz work. She was slaving away so Evelin could go to school, and Rein was constantly pushing her into a situation that could put her studies in danger, sneaking his hands in where she didn’t want them. Whenever he managed to stay over in the girls’ dorm and jammed himself into Evelin’s bunk, he would nuzzle against her breasts and his hand would reach for her abdomen and Evelin would shut her eyes tight, force the top-bunk girl’s breasts out of her mind, and shove Rein’s hand aside, holding it away from her, and to keep from thinking about whether he was angry she would think about the summer exams, partly for his sake, too, since he was going to have trouble passing. Rein just didn’t have time to study, he had so many other things, more important things, to do.

  SHE HEARD Rein’s voice now from nearby, his laugh sounding like the kind that comes out of men’s mouths when they’ve thought long and hard and come to a satisfying decision. There was a tinge of relief in it, too long a laugh to be lighthearted, too hard, like Rein’s laugh often was. He was still laughing as he led Evelin to the back door again, and they left through the same jungle they had come through before. Rein tugged off his coat, wrapped it around her legs, lifted her in his arms for the sake of her stockings, and carried her to the road. It wasn’t until they got to the bus stop that Evelin noticed a cloth bag dangling from his hand.

  “Did that man give you something?”

  “Books,” Rein said.

  “What books?”

  “You wouldn’t want to read them.”

  Evelin didn’t ask any more questions because Rein didn’t like nagging women. He was in a good mood now, stroked her collarbone, whispered in her ear: You see? There’s nothing bad going on here. His lips were so close to her lips that she could feel his kiss, and stepped back.

  “Everyone can see us.”

  “So?”

  She turned her head away and his lips touched her ear, his breath gusting into it, and her ear became a shell, like the one she’d saved from the hitchhiking trip she took to the Caucasus, and she wrapped her arms around herself like a creature in its shell so that he had to move an elbow’s length away.

  In spite of his carefree mood, Rein was tense; his hands were hotter than the sweaty bus they boarded, and it wasn’t because of her skirt hem, although she had shortened it more than she’d intended. She turned her back to him to fend off his squeezes, which had become a real nuisance.

  In the packed bus she managed to slide her hand into Rein’s bag and she felt photo paper, a large stack of it. She slipped her hand out. Rein breathed on her neck.

  THAT EVENING BEFORE going back to the dorm, Evelin shoved her hands into her coat pocket, surprised by her boldness. She had secretly worked one of the photos out of Rein’s bag. It was just text—a photo of a page of a book. The words were in a foreign language.

  Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

  THE GIRL IN LONG PANTS sitting at the Target’s otherwise empty table waved her leg again. Another girl sat down at the table and started writing on small rectangular slips of paper. An unpleasant tension spread into Comrade Parts’s temples. Here he was, a capable man, and his job was to watch little girls making crib sheets. On his way to the café he had seen his colleague slip into the entrance of the Palace Hotel. At this moment the man was probably enjoying champagne in international company, shoveling slices of white bread covered in black caviar into his mouth. Why hadn’t Parts been invited? Had someone commented on his work? Was the Office dissatisfied with him? Had officialdom really judged him better suited to this kind of assignment, spying on petty tarts and hooligans? Parts simply couldn’t believe that. He knew how to behave enough like a Westerner to qualify for the international environment at the Palace. There must be some other reason. His wife’s behavior might have attracted attention. Perhaps she was seen as a problem and the security committee thought it wisest not to give him a more visible role. The idea wasn’t out of the question. He was no longer invited to meetings with the high-ranking personnel at the Pagari. The evening soirées had dried up, too. Parts sighed. The sigh rustled his papers. The darkness of the café tired his eyes. He couldn’t help but blush when thoughts of his wife bubbled into his mind—that time when he was out with her and ran into Albert Keis, the head of the Estonian News Agency, and she started talking about the school art collection. At first Parts had no inkling, had just let the conversation continue until his brain registered that she was praising the works of the young Alfred Rosenberg on the walls of the Peter the Great Secondary School. Parts had coughed, something suddenly stuck in his throat.

  Albert Keis’s eyebrows had shot up, the whites of his eyes visible on all four sides. “What exactly are you talking about?” he said.

  “The works of the young Alfred Rosenberg. He shows signs of great talent, an impressive use of line.”

  Luckily Parts had been able to pull himself together and rescue the situation by pretending indignation. Indeed, he, too, had heard that Rosenberg’s works were still hanging there. Why hadn’t anyone taken the initiative about it? He managed to work himself up to such a gale that it blew his wife’s mistake, her ecstatic expression of admiration, into the background. The new iron they’d bought to replace their broken one weighed heavy in the shopping bag and Parts felt like leaving it on the street right where he stood. People buzzed around them, the windows of the department store glared, Keis continued to stare at them with his fish eyes, Parts’s voice rose, passersby gawked, and the hand carrying the new iron went numb. His wife had turned to look at a display window as if she had nothing to do with the whole situation.

  Later Parts heard that there had indeed been works by Rosenberg found at Tallinn Middle School Number 2, formerly the Peter the Great Secondary School, and they’d been quietly removed. His wife had tried to explain that she’d done him a service. After all, she was the one who told them about the shocking circumstance, and revealing it could only benefit him. But Parts remembered the words she’d used—“talented,” “impressive,” “a real artist.” What if Keis reported the incident to the Office?

  PARTS ORDERED a Moscow salad, a pot of coffee, and three truffles. By the time the waitress returned with a tray, his colleague had arrived and slid into the same corner where he’d been the evening before. There was a hint of a sneer on the man’s face, and it couldn’t be for anyone but him. Parts tried to hide his embarrassment by tapping his pile of papers against the tabletop, and when he’d gotten them in order he laid them out, touching his breast pocket in passing. His passport was there, as always. He recognized the compulsiveness of the gesture and tried to keep his hand under control when it rose again toward his pocket, diverting it to fiddle with his white collar. The pressers at t
he Kiire laundry combine did their jobs well enough, but since he’d gotten his advance, Parts had started to dream of a servant. The communal laundry never got things really clean. The Martinsons no doubt had a servant, and probably a washing machine, too. It was so easy for people like Martinson to underline their status with a thing like that, just mention the washing machine in passing, how it made life so much easier, and then of course we have Maria, or Anna, or Juuli, to come in and clean and do the washing for three rubles a day. Soon Parts would have a girl to come in, too, and she could iron the handkerchiefs, which they had piles of from his wife’s bad spells. He would just have to explain the reasons for the change to his wife and not back down.

  Parts didn’t like irons. The coal iron that they had used when they’d lived in Valga had pleased him even less than it did his wife, but for different reasons. Its red glow had been a vivid reminder of Patarei prison, where he’d been taken after the Germans withdrew. He had heard yells from the next room. They had a man named Alfons there, a Jew who had survived the Germans and was thus in the eyes of the Soviets clearly a German spy. Listening to his shouts, Parts had resolved to get out of there alive. The fact that they had dug up his spy training at Staffan Island still smarted. They had once again succeeded in showing their superiority, and he had failed. For years afterward the glow of the iron still carried the reek of burning flesh, the smell of humiliation. His store of German documents had rescued him from being ironed alive, but he would have gladly shared the information he had with the Russians anyway. He was a sensible man—there was no need to threaten him. Let them use the iron on unimportant people.

  After he’d soothed himself with truffles, Parts started to sort through his papers, taking notes as he went and not letting his thoughts wander the way they had the last time. His conjectures about his wife would have to be pondered elsewhere; he didn’t want his worry to show, wanted to keep a cheerful expression, although a doubt had lingered in a corner of his mind after he’d gotten the list of wives left behind by men sent to Siberia. His weakly justified and confused explanation had been accepted; he could see Porkov’s glare even here in the Moskva, his hand reaching all the way to the Kremlin. Porkov had promised him information about Dog Ear, too, but before the matter could be settled their working relationship had been terminated. At first Parts hadn’t found anything useful in the lists, no one he could have pegged as Roland’s Heart. He’d immediately eliminated women too geographically remote from Roland’s home area; he didn’t believe Roland could have found his way into a relationship with someone he didn’t know who lived far away, and the sketches in the journal had made reference to the fact that Roland hadn’t been away from his home province for long. Roland would only trust a woman he had some existing connection with. There had been only one familiar name on the list, but it was an improbable one. Parts’s wife.

  For the past two years Parts had been going through the list over and over, and he kept returning to his own wife’s name. He had begun to look at her with new eyes, searching for some hint in her behavior, some crack that he could use to make her open up and speak, something that would make him certain, some means of bringing out the truth. His suspicions were supported by the fact that he didn’t know exactly what she had been doing while he was away. She hadn’t gone to Auntie Anna’s funeral, but she had been to visit her while she was still alive. Auntie Anna had written to him and said that for once his wife had made herself useful, picking berries and mushrooms and making preserves as Leonida’s and Aksel’s strength diminished, managing to get carbolic acid for the fruit trees and berry bushes in exchange for some lard and spraying the plants the way Roland had taught her so there would be enough unblemished fruit to take to market. She had dusted the flowers in the yard, too. She’d even gone to the woods to cut firewood and spent most of her nights in the barn or the shed, sometimes staying at Leonida’s old cabin, which the kolkhoz had never found any use for. That had been wise, though. There were plenty of witnesses to her relationship with the German, times were tough, and her husband was in Siberia. But still. What if her sudden yearning for the countryside and frequent trips to Auntie Anna’s house were actually connected to Roland? What if she had gone out with her berry basket straight into Roland’s arms? What if Roland had spilled the secrets of his soul into a pillow he shared with Parts’s wife?

  Out of the corner of his eye Parts could see the leg of the girl in pants. He took slow bites of his salad, looking for the canned peas and breaking them one by one with his teeth, now and then wiping mayonnaise from the side of his mouth with his napkin. Maybe he’d lost his touch. He’d always had a natural instinct for which direction to take, but now he felt at a loss; the research for his manuscript kept running into dead ends, obstacles, or his wife’s eyes, like a wall of silicate brick, and he didn’t understand why the Office had put him in this situation. He also felt a little rusty in the field, in spite of his training. The previous evening he had panicked, once he was sure that the Target really had vanished and wasn’t just in the men’s room. He’d gathered up his papers and hurried out to the street to listen for a moment, then gone straight to the Target’s dorm building. He’d felt like a dog that had lost the trail of his prey, and gave up, the moon reflecting mockingly from the dark eyes of the dorm windows. That afternoon he had waited hopefully in an appropriately unobtrusive corner near the Target’s lecture hall, but in vain. The sideburned youth had been missing from the flood of students there, clearly a different crowd from the group that gathered at the Moskva. These were ordinary students. They lacked the perceptible excitement, the trembling agitation that reached its zenith when someone in the group made some point or other. Secret lectures, that’s what they were doing. It was no wonder that regular studies didn’t interest the boy. He was interested in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and what life was like in Finland and the West. Among the lecturers were probably those who’d traveled to the West, journalists or athletes who’d slipped through the Office’s sieve, gotten permission to travel, and repaid the privilege with this. Was it envy that bit into Parts’s flesh like a swarm of horseflies? Or was it just the stuffy air in the café?

  He had to get some results, get his career back on track. He had to sweep away his uncertainty, remember his own skills, how magical things could happen if you said them out loud or wrote them down on paper. The first time he’d witnessed that kind of miracle was in the gymnasium. There had been money missing from the teacher’s overcoat pocket and he’d been told to stand in the corner of the classroom until he was ready to confess. At the end of the school day the teacher had gathered up his books and said that he could spend the night there if he didn’t want to open his mouth, it was clear he was the culprit—while the others were outside for recess he had stayed behind because it was his turn to clean the blackboards. Young Parts had denied he was guilty, and as he let the words flow from his lips he’d felt a march beat in his pulse, a rumble in his ears, but no sour smell of fear came from his skin. His armpits were dry, his breathing as sedate as when he was at church, even though unbelief weighed like lead in the pit of his stomach. There was no way to get out of this, no way at all. The teacher would have to be crazy to believe him. But the teacher did believe him, and his belief had grown as Parts talked on, in a sure voice with no trace of a pubescent squeak, the steady voice of a man speaking the truth, and said that it had to have been his seatmate, who needed money because he hadn’t done his homework and had to pay someone else to do it. He had seen him come into the classroom while he was cleaning the blackboards. Parts had to hide his smile as he closed the gymnasium door behind him. Once he got around the corner he let it spread over his face, and it was still there as he passed the boys playing Boer War, and as he went through the park and past the cobbler’s shop all the way to his own block, still warming his face that evening as he pressed his head against his feather pillow, under which was hidden the stolen money his seatmate had given him for writing his report.

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; THE TARGET ARRIVED with his friends at 5:40 p.m. and ordered a pot of black coffee and a Moscow roll, as usual. Parts was alert.

  “We’ve prepared for the questions about the Twentieth Party Congress, the Twenty-First Party Congress, and the Twenty-Second Party Congress.”

  “Make me a crib sheet, too.”

  “Make it yourself.” The girl laughed, giving the Target a playful slap.

  Parts’s pencil was smoking—he’d gotten everything down. The pianist hadn’t started playing yet and the café was nearly empty. He could hear their conversation beautifully.

  The girl in the pants got up and toddled past to the ladies’ room. Parts wiped his mouth irritably and just then noticed the Target waving to a man who’d come in from the stairs. The man had a thick scarf wrapped around his neck, but Parts recognized him. Mägi, the radio journalist. Mägi sat down at the table and leaned toward the others, and the whispering commenced. The girl in pants returned and hurried to the table when she saw who had arrived. Parts managed to lip-read a few phrases, made out “St. George’s Night Uprising,” and put it in his notes, all the while ostensibly flipping through his papers. He was sure there must be microphones already installed in the students’ regular table, but he didn’t let that weaken his vigilance, even though it made him nothing more than a backup recorder in case of technical failure. It was raining outside. Customers coming in shook the drops from their hats. Parts wasted a worried thought on the photographer who must be outside taking pictures of people coming and going from the Moskva and no doubt longed for some warm broth and a pirozhki. He fiddled with his collar and tried to perk up, twisted the wrapping off a truffle, bit the truffle in half, and set down the rest. His colleague was sitting in his usual place. Maybe he wasn’t here to watch Parts’s Target. Maybe he was watching someone else. The mere thought of spending endless evenings in the Café Moskva felt like a weight on Parts’s temples. The students were young and overconfident, so the project wouldn’t take long in any case, but Parts decided to speed it to its conclusion. These hooligans were going to make a mistake, going to be emboldened further and abandon caution. Parts was starting to feel sure of that. They could easily be scooped up right where they sat, and he, a specialist, could get back to his normal work and buy the whitest, highest-quality paper for the final draft of his manuscript. When it came to his book, there was no time to lose.