how to make coffee substitute. The pan clattered into the oven, where there was still a toasty aroma of bread, and Aliide would have preferred to be with Ingel working rather than sitting at the table with the soldiers, although they were actually quite funny boys. They were coming again the next evening. Aliide was annoyed; Ingel was excited. Aliide didn’t want anyone but Hans, but Ingel insisted that Aliide be the one to serve the coffee at the next visit. First put small-and I mean small- pieces of sugar beet in water to simmer. Cook them twenty to thirty minutes, then put them through a sieve and add the substitute and the milk. Will you remember that? So I won’t have to explain it to you when the guests are here? You can show them that you know how to be a hostess. On their fifth visit the soldiers announced that they were being transferred to Tallinn. Aliide was relieved; Ingel looked anxious. Hans said consolingly that more Germans would be sure to come. Father and Mother would be coming home. Everything would be all right. Right before they left, one of the soldiers gave Aliide his address and asked her to write to him. Aliide promised to write, although she wasn’t going to. She could feel Ingel and Hans exchange a glance behind her.
Father and Mother were never heard from again.
Hans carved Ingel a pretty pair of wooden shoes, attached laces to them, and announced that he was going to follow the Germans.
The sisters’ nights turned sleepless.
One night Armin Joffe, with his child, his wife, and her parents, disappeared from the village. The rumor was that they had escaped to the Soviet Union for safety. They were Jews.
1944
The Russians had already spread out across the country again when Hans knocked on the window of the back room one night. Aliide pulled out the ax, Ingel started to mutter Our Father, and Linda hid under the bed, but they realized who it was soon enough. Two long, two short. Hans had come home.
As Ingel dribbled tears of joy, Aliide thought about how they were going to hide him. Hans whispered that he had run away from the German ranks and made it across the gulf by passing as a Finn. Ingel sniffled that Hans could have tried to send them a letter of some kind, but Aliide was glad he hadn’t. The fewer of his activities put down on paper the better. His escape with the Finland boys could be wiped from memory immediately; it never happened-surely Ingel understood that? What about the little room behind the kitchen-could they use that as a hiding place again? That’s where Hans had been before, when the Russians came the first time. It was a good spot-windowless-so they hid him there, but after the very first night his restlessness started to grow and he started asking about the Forest Brothers. The inactivity struck at his manhood, and he wanted to at least help with the work around the household. It was haymaking time; there were other men in hiding who were in the fields wearing skirts as a disguise, but Ingel didn’t dare allow him to do it. No one must know that he had returned, and that was made clear to Linda, too.
A couple of days later their neighbor Aino, recently widowed and in the last stages of pregnancy, ran over the field holding her belly, collapsed next to Ingel’s rake, and told them that the Berg boys were on their way there; they had marched past her house resolutely, and the youngest one was waving the blue, black, and white flag. Ingel and Aliide left the haymaking right where it was and rushed home. The Berg boys were waiting in the yard, smoking
“Have you seen Hans?”
“Why do you ask?”
Ingel and Aliide stood side by side in front of the boys and gripped each other’s fingers.
“Hans hasn’t come home since he went wherever he went.”
“But he’ll be here before long.”
“We don’t know anything about that.”
The Berg boys told them to give Hans their greetings and tell him they were forming a group and he’d best seek them out. Ingel gave them some bread and three liters of milk and promised to pass along their message. But after the boys had disappeared behind the silver willows, Ingel whispered that they must never tell Hans. He would go running after them! Aliide ignored her sniveling and said that they could expect to hear the rattle of the secret police motorcycles directly, because this march was the most conspicuous activity imaginable; didn’t Ingel understand that? They acted quickly. When the clock next struck the hour, Hans was already hiding at the edge of the woods. Lipsi started to bark in the yard, and the sound of a motorcycle could be heard approaching. Aliide and Ingel stared at each other. Hans had made it to safety at the last moment, but what if they were sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of haymaking-it would look exactly like what it was. Like something had happened and now they were just sitting there waiting to feel a gun at the back of their heads. Back to the fields then. They went through the pantry to the cowshed, through the cowshed to the stable, and from the stable through the rustling leaves in the tobacco patch to the field, as the motorcycle swung into the yard, its sidecar bouncing. “We left the kettle on the stove,” Ingel panted. “They’ll know that someone has just left the house.” They hadn’t locked the front door; it would have seemed suspicious. The Chekists would be there any moment and hear the clatter of the eggs boiling on the stove for Hans’s lunch, and they would know that someone had left the kitchen in a hurry. The two women stood in the middle of the field, peering at the house from behind a pile of stones. The men in their leather coats stopped their motorcycles, went inside, stayed there for a moment, came out, looked around, and drove away. Ingel was surprised that they left so quickly and immediately started to regret letting Hans go off into the woods just like that. Maybe they could have got out of it by talking to the Chekists. If they had been at home, the men might have just popped into the kitchen and left again, and Hans could have stayed safe in the little room behind the kitchen. What a stupid girl. Aliide didn’t understand how Hans could have chosen a woman like her.
“We have to get organized.”
“How?”
“Leave it to me.”
Ingel cried at night and Aliide stayed up thinking about their options. She couldn’t expect anything sensible from Ingel- she didn’t even notice the mold on the bread as she offered it to Linda, didn’t recognize familiar people. While Ingel hung the laundry to dry in the rain and murmured her prayers, Aliide was thinking. If Hans was going to survive, they would have to wash him clean of his activities with the civil guard, the Omakaitse self- defense league, and the Riigikogu, and the war in Finland. They couldn’t talk their way out of it, and escape was no longer possible.
Even Hans’s old confirmation classmate Theodor Kruus had cleared up his part in the anti-Soviet leaflets, but Aliide knew at what cost. Ingel didn’t know, and it was best that she didn’t.
The village militia liked to get young flesh and rosy cheeks into its jiggling belly. The younger the better. The greater the crimes of the parents, the younger the girl could be, or the more nights it would take to expiate the crime-one night, or one maidenhead, wasn’t enough. Theodor Kruus was let go because his lovely daughter redeemed him by going to the militia at night, taking off her dress and stockings, and kneeling before them. Theodor Kruus’s record as an agitator disappeared, the leaflets he wrote and his other anti-Soviet activities were placed under someone else’s name, and that someone else got ten years in the mines and five years of exile. Hans’s activities were punishable by death, or years in Siberia, at the very least.
Did Theodor know what his daughter had done? Maybe the militia told him. Aliide could easily imagine the booted militiamen with their legs spread wide, coming to whisper about it in Theodor’s ear.
Ingel wouldn’t be able to do it-all she could do was sniffle, with her nose against the rya rug on the wall. And Ingel wasn’t young enough for the militia anymore. Neither was Aliide. They only wanted girls who weren’t yet women. Besides, Aliide couldn’t do it-or could she? She lay awake till there were circles under her eyes, and there was no one she could ask what to do or how to do it.
After endless hours awake, Aliide thought of curtains. She had stared and stared at the black night, the moon,
