When the Doves Disappeared Read Free Page A

let him give a lecture about Red Army insignia, smoothly churning out the Russian words. He even tried to teach the other men to parachute, although he’d never once done it himself. He spent the evenings mastering the falsification of papers for when we went back to Estonia, whispering to me about his plans for an elite group made up of men from the island. I let him blather. I’d grown up with him, I was used to his overactive imagination. But the other men pricked up their ears at his nonsense.
    We had plenty of free time, moments when most of the men would gawk at every skirt they saw like she was the original Eve. I passed the time thinking about Rosalie and the spring sowing. That June we’d learned about the deportations. No one had heard from my father since his arrest the year before. At the time my mother had wept, said he should have known to take off his hat and sing when the Internationale played, keep his mouth shut about the potato association, not say anything against the nationalization, but I knew my father was incapable of that. And that was why his house was taken, his son was in the forest, and he was in prison. The Bolsheviks wanted to make an example of him. Then they told people that their land wouldn’t be taken away—but who could believe them?
    Edgar, on the other hand, wasn’t upset about Simson Farm, even though it was the farm that had paid for his school, the student days in Tartu that he had so many stories about. There were a lot of students onthe island, not as many men from the countryside. Edgar and the other university boys hadn’t seen much of life. You could hear it in the way they laughed at anyone who struck them as simpler than they were. For them, “uneducated” was an insult, and they judged a person by whether he’d made it to the third grade, or higher. Sometimes they sounded like they’d been reading too many English spy novels. They got carried away fantasizing about the secret agents they were going to send out from the island, about how the Reds’ days were numbered. And Edgar was right out in front, preaching the gospel. I wrote some of the men off as adventurers, but there weren’t any cowards among them, which gave me some confidence. And we mastered the basics. We were all trained on the radio and in Morse code, and although Edgar was clumsy at loading his gun, his supple fingers were well suited to the telegraph. He’d gotten his speed up to a hundred strokes per minute. My clumsy mitts were made for farmwork. At least we agreed about the most important things; we both had the same politics, the same pro-English position.
    I had my own plans: where I used to carry Rosalie’s photo I now kept loose-leaf notebook paper—carrying the entire notebook would have been foolhardy. I’d also bought a bound diary. I wanted to collect evidence of the destruction wreaked by the Bolsheviks. When peace came, I would turn the documents over to someone who was good with words, someone who could write the history of our fight for freedom. The importance of this task gave me strength whenever I doubted that I’d be a part of these grand plans, whenever I felt like a coward for choosing a course of action that avoided combat, because I knew I was doing my part, something that I could be proud of. I had no intention of writing anything that would put anyone at risk or reveal too many identifiable details. I wouldn’t use names; I might not even mention locations. I planned to get a camera, but I wouldn’t be taking any group photos. Spies’ eyes glittered everywhere, greedy for the gold of dead Estonians’ dust.

Tallinn, Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union
    T HE GRAIN WAREHOUSES were burning, the sky grew columns of smoke. Buses, trucks, and cars filled the roads, their worn tires screaming like the people were, screaming to get away. And then an explosion. Shrapnel. Shards of glass like a shower of rain. Juudit stood with her mouth open in a corner of her