Purge

mattress at night, so that he would do everything he could to arrange to get that house for them. And the animals should stay with the house! She didn’t want anyone else’s animals. Maasi was her cow! If she found the barn empty, Martin would set his men after the thieves and send them all to Siberia! She marveled at the fury that blazed up the moment she thought of someone else touching her animals. Because they were hers now -Ingel was just milking the cows for a little while longer. They ought to take one cow over to the barn at the collective farm, so they could stay within the quota. But Martin could arrange to get it back later. Anyway, no one would come to count the animals in a party organizer’s barn.

But in the beginning Aliide didn’t want to think about the most essential question: How would Hans stay hidden with Martin sleeping under the same roof? Hans wasn’t a snorer, but what if he started snoring? Or sneezed in the middle of the night? What if he had a cough? Hans knew how to be quiet when guests were visiting, it’s true, but what about when Martin was actually living in the same house? Talking about Great-Grandma haunting the place wouldn’t work on Martin. Aliide pressed her hands to her forehead and cheeks. How long had she been standing there? She started moving her feet toward home. She tasted blood in her mouth. She had bitten her cheek. The attic. She had to get Hans into the attic. Or a cellar. She would have to build a cellar under the pantry or the little spare room. Or was the attic better? The attic extended from the house over the barn and the stable, and above the barn and stable it was full of hay, the bales packed so tightly that it would be impossible to investigate. If a closet were built there, no one would ever notice it. It could be built behind the hay bales. Above the barn. Since Aliide would be feeding the cows, she could be in the barn all the time to drop the hay from the trapdoor to the cows below. Martin would probably never even set foot in the barn-he didn’t know how to milk, and he didn’t like chickens, either, because they had almost pecked his eye out when he was a child, and a cow had trod on his foot and crushed it. No wonder Martin had decided to become an agitator-he never would have managed with the animals. Anyway, the animals would make noise. Hans could sneeze and cough all he wanted. And the rafters above the barn were thicker, too; there were thirty centimeters of sand between the planks. No one would hear anything.

As soon as Ingel and Linda had been taken away she would build a room-she could do it by herself. There were boards ready in the attic scrap heap. Then just put the hay in front of it. She could use bales that were easy to move but wouldn’t attract anyone’s notice-even if someone went all the way up to the attic.

When Aliide went to visit Ingel, sometimes she watched her closely and at other times couldn’t bring herself to even glance in her direction. After that first night in the town hall, Aliide had made an effort to avoid her gaze, just as her sister had avoided Aliide’s gaze, but after seeing the list Aliide felt a compulsion to go to Ingel’s house just to look at her. She sometimes crept up on her as she was working-she had an urge to stare at Ingel the way you stare at something fading, something that will never be seen again. She did it in secret, when Ingel was checking on the animals, bringing clover to the cows that were coming into milk, focused on her work.

The same applied to Linda. After the night at the town hall, Linda had become almost mute. She said only yes and no, only when she was asked, and she didn’t say that much to strangers. Ingel had had to explain it to people in the village by saying that Linda had nearly been trampled by a bolting horse and had been so frightened that she had stopped speaking. She said she was sure it would pass eventually. When they were in the kitchen, Ingel chatted and laughed so that Hans wouldn’t notice Linda’s silence.

Once, Aliide caught Linda stabbing at her own hand with a fork. The girl had a look about her that was absent and at the same time focused, her tight braids pulled back at the temples, and she didn’t notice Aliide. She aimed at the middle of her palm and struck. Her gaze was locked, her expression unmoving, as she pointed the fork at her hand, her mouth simply open, soundless.

For a single, fleeting moment, a voice inside Aliide urged Linda to strike again, strike harder, strike with all her strength, but as soon as the thought reached her consciousness, it was silenced by shock. You shouldn’t think those things, evil things. People who had evil thoughts were evil themselves. She ought to go to Linda, take her in her arms and pet her, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to touch that creature, and she was disgusted; she detested her own body and Linda’s body and the thin, waxy coating that had appeared on her skin. And Linda stabbed with the fork, and raised her hand, and stabbed again, and Aliide watched, and the palm of Linda’s hand turned red. Aliide’s hands curled into fists. Lipsi barked in the yard. The bark propelled Aliide into the kitchen. Linda, glassy-eyed, didn’t move; she held on to the fork but didn’t stab again. Aliide took the fork from her, Ingel came inside, and Linda ran out. “What happened to her?”

“Nothing.”

Ingel didn’t ask any more questions, she just said it was a peculiar spring.

“We’ll be going to the fields in nothing but a sweater soon.”

The day approached. Two weeks… thirteen days… twelve… eleven… ten nights… nine… eight… seven evenings. In a week they would be gone. The house wouldn’t be Ingel’s anymore. Ingel wouldn’t wash these dishes anymore or feed these chickens. She wouldn’t make chicken feed in this kitchen or dye yarn. She wouldn’t brown the sauce for Hans or wash Linda’s hair in birch ashes and water. She wouldn’t sleep in these beds anymore. Aliide would sleep in them.

Aliide could hear herself constantly panting. She panted unceasingly, pulling oxygen in through her mouth, because her nostrils weren’t powerful enough to pull the air in. What if one of the people who decide these things changed their mind? But why would they? Or what if someone else got wind of it and warned Ingel? Who might do that? Who would want to help Ingel? No one. Why was she so restless? What was troubling her? Everything was already decided. She could relax. All she had to do was wait, wait one more week, and then move in.

In the evenings, Martin would whisper that soon they would move into their new home, and his hand would rest on her neck, his lips on her breasts, as they lay side by side in the little room with the Roosipuu children making noise, strangers banging around, and time rolled inexorably onward -six days, five nights, the hands of the clock turning like millstones, grinding fifteen past Christmases to dust-the candles on the Christmas tree and the Christmas crowns from hollowed eggshells, the birthday cakes, the hymns Ingel had sung in the choir, and the nursery rhymes she had belted out since she was a child and then taught to Linda, a clever cat with cunning eyes, sat on a stump in the woods. There was dust in Aliide’s eyes, the whites were crisscrossed with veins like ice, and she wouldn’t ever have to sit at the same table with Ingel and Linda again. There would never again be a morning like the morning they came home together from the town hall, walked for kilometers, just after dawn, the morning air fresh and quiet. A kilometer before they reached home, Ingel had stopped Linda by tugging on her arm and started to rebraid her hair. She combed Linda’s hair with her fingers, smoothed it, and started braiding it tightly. They stood in the middle of the village road, the sun had risen and a door slammed somewhere, Ingel braided Linda’s hair, and Aliide waited, hunkered down, pressing her hands against the road, feeling the little bits of limestone, not looking at the others, and suddenly her throat tightened with a terrible thirst, and she strode over to the ditch, scooped water into her mouth, tasted dirt, scooped up more water. Ingel and Linda had started walking again, holding hands, their backs receding. Aliide followed behind them, gazing toward them, looking at their backs, staring at them until they reached their own front door. At the door Ingel turned around and said, “Clean your face.”

Aliide raised her hands to her cheeks and wiped them; at first she couldn’t feel her cheeks or her hands, and then she realized that the lower half of her face was covered with snot and her neck was wet. She wiped her nose, chin, and neck with her sleeve, purged her face. Ingel opened the door and they stepped into the familiar kitchen, where they felt like strangers.

Ingel starting making pancakes.

Linda brought a jar of raspberry jam to the table. The dark raspberries looked clotted with blood. Aliide shoved Lipsi outside; they went to the table and put pancakes on their plates. Linda got honey on hers, and they passed around the jam, their plates shone like the whites of eyes, their knives slashed, their forks clattered, and they ate their pancakes with rubber lips, glass eyes shiny and dry, waxed cloth skin dry and smooth.

Five days left. Aliide woke up with a clever cat with cunning eyes playing in her head. It was Ingel’s voice. She sat up on the edge of the bed-the song didn’t go away, the sound didn’t disappear. Aliide was sure they would come back.

She wrenched her flannel nightgown over her head- with a pipe in his mouth and a cane in his hand-got into her rumpled underwear and stockings, dress on, coat, scarf in her hand, and ran out through the kitchen, grabbed the handlebars of her bicycle, threw it down, went across the fields, the fastest route to the town hall, where Martin had gone earlier that morning. She poked at her hair on the way, didn’t stop, adjusted the scarf on her head, and ran, her overshoes flapping, her coat fluttering behind her. She ran over the