Zara packed her suitcase again, piled everything on top of the hotel brochure and stockings, closed the case, and put it back in its place in the wardrobe. Grandmother had turned back to the window to stare at the sky. You couldn’t put a blanket over the window in the winter, even though there was a draft, though they tried to seal up everything as well as they could. Grandmother had to be able to see the sky-even at night, when there was nothing to see. She said that it was the same sky they had at home. And the Big Dipper was important to her, because it was the same Big Dipper they had at home, it was just a little fainter-sometimes you really had to search for it. It was always easy to get Grandmother to smile with the Big Dipper-Zara just had to point to it and say its name. As a child, Zara hadn’t understood why. It wasn’t until later that she realized that Grandmother was talking about Estonia. She was born there, just like Zara’s mother was. Then the war came, and the famine, and the war had taken Grandfather, and they had to escape the Germans. They had come to Vladivostok, and there was work here, and more food, too, so they had stayed.
“Would it be wrong to go to Germany to work?” Zara asked her grandmother.
Grandmother didn’t turn her head. “You’ll have to ask your mother.”
“But she won’t say anything. She never says anything. If she wants me to go, she won’t say anything, and if she doesn’t want me to go, she won’t say anything.”
“Your mother’s a woman of few words.”
“Of no words, you mean.”
“Now,” Grandmother said reproachfully.
“I don’t think she cares whether I’m here or somewhere else.”
“That’s not true.”
“Don’t defend her!”
Zara slurped her tea angrily. The tea went down the wrong pipe, and she started coughing until her eyes watered. She would leave. At least she would be away from the shuffling of her mother’s slippers. Other people’s mothers had been in the bombing when they were children, and they still talked, even though Grandmother said that a bomb can frighten a child into silence. Why did her mother have to be the one who was shocked by the bombs like that? Zara would leave. She would send her grandmother tons of money and maybe a telescope. She would just see what her mother would have to say when she came back with a suitcase full of dollars and paid for her school and became a doctor in record time and got them their own apartment. She would have her own room where she could study in peace, cram for tests, and she would have a Western hairstyle, and wear shiny stockings every day, and Grandmother could look at the Big Dipper through a telescope.
1992
Zara woke up to the homey smell of boiling pigs’ ears snaking its way out of the kitchen. She thought at first that she was in Vladivostok-she recognized the sound of the lid rattling on the pot of boiling water, the familiar smell of gristle- her mouth was already watering-but then a feather’s shaft poked her in the cheek-it had come through the pillow- and she opened her eyes and saw the corner of an unfamiliar rya rug on the wall. She was at Aliide Truu’s house. The wallpaper was blistered, the seams of the paper were crookedly pasted. A delicate spiderweb hung faintly between the rug and the wallpaper, with a dead fly dangling from it. Zara moved the corner of the rug with a finger, and the spider skittered under it. She was just about to press the rug against the spider and flatten it, but then she remembered that killing a spider meant your own mother would die. She stroked the rug. Her scalp felt light, and her skin felt like springtime against the flannel of her buttoned nightgown. The liquor-soaked socks that Aliide had put on her had been unpleasantly cold in the evening but were warm now, and she could still smell the fragrance of soap. Zara smiled. The sun peeped in through a slit in the curtains, and the curtains were exactly as she had imagined they would be.
Her bed had been made on the front-room sofa. The back room was so full of drying plants that there was no place for a proper bed. The floor, beds, shelves, and tables were covered with newspapers. Marigolds, horsetail, mint, yarrow, and caraway were scattered over them. Bags full of dried apple slices and dried black bread hung along the walls. On the little tables in front of the window there were homemade elixirs stacked in the sunlight. One of the jars appeared to be infested, and Zara turned her gaze immediately away. The air of the back room was so heavy with the scent of herbs that she hardly would have been able to sleep there. Aliide had, in fact, made herself a place to sleep on the rag rug in front of the back room door, carefully condensing the plants’ leaves that covered the newspapers to make a space big enough for one person on the floor. Zara’s suggestion that the spot would suit her fine hadn’t suited Aliide. She had probably feared that Zara would crush the herbs when she turned over in her sleep. The drug smell filled this room, as well, but not too strongly. There were only heaps of honeycombs, a few jars, and a string bag full of garlic next to the stove. There was a pile of worn cushions beside the radio cabinet. The white lace of the pillow covers had yellowed, but they gleamed in the dimness of the room. Zara had sneaked a look at them before going to sleep. Each one had a monogram, and no two were the same.
The door to the kitchen where the pigs’ ears were cooking was closed, but the radio was loud enough that she could hear it. It was a program about how the radio tower in Warsaw collapsed a year ago. The largest structure ever built, it had been 629 meters tall. Zara jumped out of bed. Her heart was pounding. “Aliide?”
Zara looked out the window, expecting to see a black Volga or BMW. But there wasn’t anything unusual in the yard. She strained to hear anything out of the ordinary, but all she could hear was the rush of her own blood, the radio, the ticking of the clock, and the creak of the floor as she crept toward the kitchen door. Would Pasha and Lavrenti be sitting there calmly, drinking tea? Would they be waiting for her? Wouldn’t it be just like them to let her wake up peacefully and come into the kitchen, suspecting nothing? Wouldn’t that be the most diabolical plan, and thus the most desirable, in their minds? They would be leaning against a corner of the table, smug, smoking a cigarette and thumbing through the paper. And they would smile when Zara came into the kitchen. They would have forced Aliide to keep quiet and sit between them, the old woman’s watery eyes wide with terror. Actually, it was hard to imagine such an expression on Aliide’s face.
Zara pushed against the tightly closed door. It complained loudly as it opened. The kitchen was empty. There was no trace of Pasha and Lavrenti. On the table were Aliide’s recipe book, an open newspaper, and a few krooni in bills. The pigs’ ears were boiling under a cloud of steam. The floor was wet in front of the washbasin. The basin was empty, as was the bathtub, and the slop buckets were full to the brim. Aliide was nowhere to be seen. The outer door swung open and Zara stood staring at it. Was it them?
Aliide stepped inside.
“Good morning, Zara. I guess you needed some sleep.” She set a bucket of water on the floor.
“What’s this? What have you done to your hair?” Zara sat down at the table and rubbed her head. Scratchy stubble, a breeze on her neck.
The scissors were lying next to the sugar bowl. She grabbed them and started to cut her nails. Ragged halfmoons specked with red dropped onto the oilcloth.
“We certainly could have thought of a way to dye your hair. Rhubarb would have turned it red.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Just leave those fingernails be. I have a file here somewhere. We can take care of them properly.”
“No.”
“Zara, your husband doesn’t know to look here. Why would he? You could be anywhere. Have some coffee and calm down. I ground up some real coffee beans this morning.”
She filled Zara’s cup from the percolator and went to lift the pigs’ ears out of the pot with a slotted spoon, glancing at Zara now and then as she wielded the scissors. When she finished her manicure, Zara started to stir the sugar spoon through the large, yellowish crystals. Her fingertips felt naked and clean. The damp whisper of the sugar mixed soothingly with the hum of the refrigerator. Should she try to look as calm as possible? Or should she tell Aliide what kind of a man Pasha really was? Which would make Aliide most likely to help? Or should she try to
