forget about Pasha for a while and concentrate on Aliide? She should at least try to think clearly.
“They always find you.”
“They?”
“My husband, I mean.”
“This probably isn’t the first time you’ve run away.”
Zara’s spoon came to a stop in the sugar.
“You don’t have to answer.”
Aliide brought a bowl of pigs’ ears to the table.
“I must say that you’re in pretty bad shape to be a decoy.”
“A what?”
“Don’t play dumb, young lady. A decoy. The pretty young thing who’s sent to find out if there’s anything of value on the premises. Usually they make them lie down in the middle of the road, pretending to be injured, so that cars will stop and then-whoops!-there goes the car. Actually, you should have waited to come until after my daughter has been here.”
Aliide stopped talking and started to fill up their plates, still glancing at Zara nonchalantly now and then. She was obviously waiting for Zara to say something. Was there a snare hidden in what Aliide had said? Zara mulled over the words, but there didn’t seem to be anything unusual in them. So she asked an easy question.
“Why is that?”
Aliide didn’t answer right away. Apparently she had expected Zara to say something else.
“There’ll be plenty of visitors from the village here then, everybody wanting to see what Talvi brought me. But I’ll hide most of it in the milk cans. I’ll just leave out a couple of packages of coffee. Not that there would be anything in those cans right now. They’re empty, just a little macaroni and flour. They’re waiting for my daughter to come and visit. She’s coming to spoil her old mother.”
Zara continued to stir around in the sugar bowl with the spoon, which had become an amorphous glob of clinging sugar, and tried to figure out what Aliide was driving at.
“I’ve asked her to bring me all kinds of things,” she said.
All of a sudden it hit Zara. A car! Was Aliide’s daughter coming in a car?
“She’s coming in her own car. And she promised to bring me a new television to replace that old Rekord. What do you think of that? It’s amazing how you can bring electronics over the border nowadays, just like that.”
Zara scooped up a pig’s ear. Her knife clinked against her plate and her fork slowly pierced the ear. She kept missing, her fork was clattering, and she gripped the cutlery tightly in her fingers. She knew she should loosen her grip or Aliide would know that she was trying to keep her hands from trembling. She shouldn’t look too eager, she had to eat her pig’s ear and talk at the same time-chewing it made her voice more level. She asked where Talvi was going when she left here-was she driving straight to Tallinn? Even if Zara could get to the nearest town, though-what town was it, anyway?-she couldn’t take the bus or the train, because Pasha would know about it immediately, and so would the militia. Aliide pointed out that they were called police nowadays, but Zara continued-surely Aliide could understand that she had to get to Tallinn in secret. If anyone saw her, her trip would be cut off right then and there.
“I just need a ride to Tallinn, nothing more.”
Aliide’s brow wrinkled. It was a bad sign, but Zara couldn’t stop herself now, her voice speeded up and her words faltered, she skipped words, went back to pick up the ones she had forgotten. Imagine, a car! Talvi had a car. It could solve all of her problems. When was she coming?
“Soon.”
“How soon?”
“Maybe in the next couple of days.”
If Pasha didn’t get there first, she could escape to Tallinn with Talvi’s help. She shouldn’t think about what would happen then, how she would get from Tallinn to Finland. Maybe she could try to hide in a truck at the harbor or something. How did Pasha arrange to get people over the border? They open the trunks of cars at the border, she knew that. It would have to be a truck, a Finnish truck. Finns could always get through more easily. There was no way for her to get a passport unless she stole one from some Finnish woman, someone her age. Too tricky-she couldn’t manage something like that by herself. First get to Tallinn. She had to get Aliide on her side now. But how? How could she manage to bluff away the wrinkles in Aliide’s brow? She should calm down, forget about Talvi and her car for a little while and not make Aliide any more nervous with her overeagerness. Possibilities steamed in and out of her head, she couldn’t tame them, not enough to think things through. Her temples were throbbing. She should breathe deeply, act trustworthy. Like the kind of girl that older people like. She should try to be sweet and polite and well behaved and helpful, but she had a whore’s face and a whore’s gestures, although cutting her hair had surely helped to some extent. Fuck it-it was no use.
Zara focused her gaze on Aliide’s coffee cup. If she really concentrated on some object, she could do a better job of answering anything she was asked. The yellowish porcelain had black cracks in it like a trace of spiderweb. The sides of the cup were translucent and reminded her of young skin, although the cup was old. It was shallow and daintily shaped. It had a refinement that belonged to a different world than the other kitchen things, a vanished world. Zara hadn’t seen any other dishes in the cupboard that could have belonged to the same set, although of course she didn’t know what all of Aliide’s dishes were like, only the ones that were on view. Aliide had drunk coffee, milk, and water out of it, only rinsing it between uses. It was obviously her favorite cup. Zara followed its cracks and waited for the next question.
Aliide pushed the bowl of tomatoes toward her.
“It was a good harvest this year.”
A fly was walking among the tomatoes.
Zara bent over the bowl.
Aliide swatted at the fly.
“They only lay their eggs on meat.”
Aliide’s interest was piqued. She tried to coax something out of the girl about this fascination with Finland, but she didn’t show any more curiosity about Talvi, or electronics. She just clinked her fork against her plate, her mouth diligently eating the ear, her coffee cup clattering, taking great gulps that you could hear over the sound of the radio, and now and then touching the stubble on her head. Her chest heaved. It was the car that got the girl worked up, not the new television or anything else. Maybe she really didn’t care about them, or maybe she was just devilishly clever. But could such a dishrag of a girl be a decoy? Or even a thief? Aliide could spot a thief. This girl didn’t have quick enough eyes. She carried herself like a dog that has to constantly look out for kids trying to step on its tail. Her expression was always going into hiding, her body always pulling itself into a huddle. Thieves were never like that, not even the ones who were beaten to teach them the trade. And the mention of gifts from Finland hadn’t brought any color to her cheeks or sparked any interest. The expression that Aliide had been expecting, that familiar gleam of greed, that quiver of awe in her voice, never came. Or did she want to steal the car?
Anyway, Aliide had tested her by leaving her alone in the kitchen and going outside, then peeking in the window, but the girl hadn’t dashed for her handbag or even glanced at the bills lying on the table, although Aliide had scattered them there on purpose, had picked one up as a topic of conversation later on, held up the bills and said, “Look at these, they’re almost two months old, kroon bills, we don’t have rubles anymore-can you imagine?” She had chattered for a long time about the currency reform day, the twentieth of June, and after that she had stuck the money in a corner of the cupboard, but the girl had taken no notice. While Aliide jabbered about the fall in the value of currency and how rubles had turned into toilet paper, there was a faraway look in the girl’s eyes, and she nodded politely now and then, snatching up a word into her consciousness and then letting it go without reacting. Later Aliide went to check and counted the bills when she wasn’t around. They hadn’t been touched. Aliide had also tried to drop hints about the handsomeness of her woods, but she hadn’t seen even the smallest bit of interest in the girl’s eyes.
Instead, when she was left alone she rubbed her arms and fell to examining the sugar bowl from the old Estonian days that was on the table, tracing its cracks and pattern with her finger and looking through it at the kitchen. No thief would be interested in a broken dish. Aliide had tried the same trick in the other room, leaving the girl there by herself while she went to fetch some water from the well. Before she went, she pushed one of the
