When the Doves Disappeared Read Free

afford. The acts of the Bolsheviks had already proved that our country and our homes were under the control of barbarians. But I didn’t criticize the captain openly. As an educated man and a hero of the War of Independence, he knew more about fighting than I did, and there was a lot of wisdom in his leadership. He had trained the troops, taught them how to shoot, how to use Morse code, made them spend time every day practicing their running, the most important skill in the forest.I might have stayed in Estonia with his group if it hadn’t been for his habit of taking notes. And the camera. I’d been with the Forest Brothers for some time when one morning they started talking about taking a group photo. I slipped away, said I shouldn’t be in it since I wasn’t really part of the gang. The boys posed in front of the dugout leaning on each other’s shoulders, their hand grenades hanging from their belts, one of them with his head stuck into the horn of a portable gramophone as a joke. The photo included a proudly displayed knapsack full of communist money taken from the town hall. The Green Captain had given it out in bundles. Take your fair share, he’d told them. This is a repayment for the cash the Soviet Union confiscated from the people.
    The captain was a legend, but I didn’t want to be that kind of hero. Was it weakness? Was I any better than Edgar?
    Rosalie would have been proud to have pictures of my training on Staffan Island or my time with the Green Captain’s group of Forest Brothers, but I didn’t intend to make the same mistake the captain did. I even tore up Rosalie’s picture, though my fingers didn’t want to do it. Her gaze had comforted me at many hopeless moments. I would need that comfort if my life were flowing out of my veins into the earth. I needed it now, as we trekked over the stones and moss, now that I’d left our fighting brothers behind. I needed that look in her eyes. Edgar, clomping along behind me, had never carried a photo of his wife. When he showed up at the cabin where I was waiting to leave for Finland, he made it clear that I shouldn’t say a word to anyone about his being back in his home province. An understandable worry for a deserter, and he knew how fragile Mother’s nerves were. Still, I couldn’t imagine doing such a thing myself, not giving Rosalie any sign that I was alive. I could hear Edgar huffing and puffing behind me and I couldn’t fathom why he wanted to let his wife believe he was still a conscript in the Red Army. I was in a mad rush to get to Rosalie’s house, and Edgar hadn’t said a word about seeing his own wife. I half suspected that he was planning to leave her, that he’d found a new girl, maybe in Helsinki. He’d often been out and about by himself there, traipsing off to the Klaus Kurki restaurant. But he never seemed to let a woman cloud his vision, and he didn’t go in for drinking like the other men did, you could tell by the freshness of his breath when he came back to our quarters. He also wore the same free clothes that I did, althoughhe had puckered up his mouth when he saw the cut and the fabric. You couldn’t take a girl out for a stroll in those clothes, and you couldn’t amuse her on twenty marks a day, let alone sample Helsinki’s brothels. It was just enough money for tobacco, socks, the bare necessities.
    The other men had taken one look at Edgar and decided he was different, and I was afraid he’d be sent away from the island as unfit to fight. I really had to work on him after he split his forehead open with the kick of his rifle butt and turned even more gun-shy. I wondered how he’d managed in the Red Army. And where had he gotten so soft around the middle? Red Army provisions were hardly pure lard and white bread. On Staffan Island his belly had disappeared, since everything in Finland was rationed.
    Edgar had been forgiven a lot because he was a talker. When members of the Finnish command became instructors, they