She inhaled so deeply that she felt a stab in her lungs like ice on a tooth. She had been wrong. The relief took her legs out from under her and she fell onto the steps with a thud.
No Pasha, no Lavrenti, no black car.
She turned her face toward the sky. That must be the Big Dipper. The same Big Dipper that you could see over Vladivostok, although this one looked different. Grandmother had looked at the Big Dipper from this same garden when she was young, the Big Dipper that looks like that one. Her grandmother-she had stood in the same place, in front of this same house, on the same stepping-stones. The same birches had been in front of her, and the wind on her cheeks had been the same, and it had moved through those same apple trees. Grandmother had sat in the same kitchen that she had just been sitting in, woke up in the same room that she woke up in this morning, drunk water from the same well, stepped out of the same door. Grandmother’s steps had weighed on the soil of this garden, she had left from this yard to go to church, and her cow had rammed its stall in that barn. The grass that tickled Zara’s foot was her grandmother’s touch, and the wind in the apple trees was her grandmother’s whisper, and Zara felt like she was looking at the Big Dipper through her grandmother’s eyes, and when she turned her face back up toward the sky, she felt like her grandmother’s young body stood inside hers, and it ordered her to go back inside, to search for a story that she hadn’t been told.
Zara felt in her pocket. The photograph was still there.
The moment the girl stepped outside, Aliide slammed the door shut behind her and locked it. She went to sit in her own place at the kitchen table and eased open the drawer that was hidden under the oilcloth, so that if she needed to she could quickly whip out the pistol she had kept in the drawer since Martin had made her a widow. The yard was silent. Maybe the girl had gone on her way. Aliide waited a minute, two minutes. Five. The clock ticked, the fire roared, the walls creaked, the refrigerator hummed, outside the damp air ate at the thatched roof, a mouse rustled in the corner. Time unwound ten minutes further, and then there was a knock and a call at the door. It was the girl, asking her to open the door and saying that there was no one else there, just her. Aliide didn’t move. How did she know the girl was telling the truth? Maybe her husband was lurking behind her. Maybe he had somehow been able to make things clear to her without making any noise.
Aliide got up, opened the door in the pantry that led to the stable, went past the deserted trough and the manger to the big double doors, and carefully opened one half of the door a chink. There was no one in the yard. She pushed the door farther open and saw the girl alone on the steps, then she went back in the kitchen and let her in. Relief wafted into the room. The girl’s back was straightened and her ears had settled down. She was breathing calmly, inhaling deeply. Why had she been out in the yard so long, if she hadn’t found the man there? She said again that there hadn’t been anyone there. Aliide poured her a fresh cup of coffee substitute, started chatting at the same time about getting out some tea, decided to try to keep the girl’s mind off the rocks and the window as long as possible. We did already have some tea today, after all. The girl nodded. It was harder to come by a little while back. She nodded again. Although there was raspberry and mint tea to make up for it-there are plenty of things to make tea from in the countryside. In the midst of this prattle, Aliide realized that the girl was going to start asking about the hooligans again, and because she had calmed down so much, she wasn’t going to accept Aliide’s mumbling something about wild boars. At what point had her mind become so feeble that she could no longer think of believable explanations for strange rattlings at the window? Her fear had loosened its hold, but she still felt its breath, the way it blew cold on her feet through the cracks in the floor that it had trickled into. She wasn’t afraid of the hooligans, so she didn’t understand why the terror that had gripped the girl hadn’t disappeared the moment she rushed back inside, bringing the soothing smell of grass with her. Suddenly she felt that she could hear the moon arching across the sky. She realized that the thought didn’t make any sense, and she grabbed her cup and squeezed the stump of the handle until her hands started to look like bones.
The girl drank her coffee substitute and looked at Aliide-a little differently than she had before. Aliide felt it, although she wasn’t looking at the girl; she just continued to complain about Gorbachev’s alcohol ban and reminisce about the way they used to make tea that had a drug effect by using several packages for one glassful. There had been some name for the drink, too, but she couldn’t remember it. They used it a lot in the army, she thought, and in prison. And she had forgotten to change the mushrooms in the mushroom tea during all this fuss! Complaining, Aliide snatched a glass jar from the Estonian days that had a tea mushroom in it, took the gauze out of the mouth of the jar, admired the little mushroom growing out of the side of the large one, and sugared some fresh tea to pour into the jar.
“This will help keep your blood pressure in check,” she explained.
“Tibla,” the girl interrupted.
“What?”
“Tibla.”
“Now I don’t understand you at all.”
“It says ‘
That was news to Aliide.
“Kids playing,” she ventured suddenly, but the explanation didn’t seem convincing. She tried again, saying that when she was young she used to wash clothes on the shore and beat on the piles, and the boys would beat on stones right behind her. They called it the ghost game and thought it was very funny.
The girl wasn’t listening. She asked if Aliide was from Russia.
“What? No!”
A person could easily think that, the girl said, since Aliide’s door had “
“No!”
“Then why would they write ‘Magadan’ on your door?”
“How should I know! When has there ever been any sense in boys’ games?”
“Don’t you have a dog? Everyone else has one.”
In fact, Aliide had had a dog, Hiisu, but it died. And actually Aliide was sure that Hiisu had been poisoned-just like her chickens, all five of them-and then her sauna had burned down, but she didn’t tell the girl about this, or about how every now and then she heard Hiisu’s footsteps, or the clucking of her hens, and how it was impossible to remember that there was no one else to feed in the house except herself and the flies. She had never lived in a house with an empty barn. She just couldn’t get used to it. She wanted to turn the conversation back around to this Pasha, but she wasn’t likely to succeed, because the girl had so many questions, followed by exclamations of wonder. Wasn’t her daughter worried about her alone without a dog in the countryside?
“I don’t trouble her with trivial matters.”
“But…”
Aliide snapped up a bucket and went to get some water, the enamel clanking, the bucket swinging loudly. She tucked her head in a defiant position and went outside to show that there was nothing threatening waiting there, no extra pairs of eyes in the black walls of the night. And her back didn’t itch as she went out into the dark yard.
1991
The first time the rain of rocks flew at Aliide’s window it was a clear, breathable night in May. Hiisu’s barking had already managed to wake her up, and she had sluggishly slapped her fear into a corner like a slippery-footed insect. She turned onto her side with her back to the fear, and the straw in her mattress rustled; she wasn’t going to take the trouble to get up because of a couple of rocks. When the second shower of stones came, she had already started to feel superior. Did they imagine they could scare her with a few rocks? Her. Of all people. Such childishness made her laugh. Didn’t they have any larger weapons than that to mess around with? The only thing that would get her out of bed at night was a tank coming through her fence. You never know, it could happen some day, not because of these hooligans, of course, but if a war broke out. She wouldn’t want that, not anymore,
