When the Doves Disappeared Read Free Page B

mother’s kitchen. Her mother had escaped to the countryside, to her sister Liia’s house, and left Juudit on her own to wait for the bomb, the bomb that would end everything. The roads from Tallinn to Narva had for some time been clogged with trucks full of evacuees’ possessions, and there were rumors about the evacuation commissariat, rumors that they’d set up commissariats for cattle evacuation, grain evacuation, lentil evacuation—a commissariat for anything they could get their hands on. The Bolsheviks intended to take it all with them, every last crumb, down to the smallest piece of potato. They weren’t going to leave anything for the Germans—or the Estonians. The army had ordered its men to empty the fields, and all of it was headed to Narva or to the harbors. Another explosion.
    Juudit put her hands over her ears and pressed hard. She had alreadyaccepted that the town would be destroyed before the Germans could get there; she only hoped that her time wouldn’t come until some more ordinary day, that the last sound she heard would be the clink of a spoon on a saucer, the jangle of hairpins in a box, the hollow ring of a milk pitcher set down on a table. Birds! Birds singing! But the Luftwaffe and the antiaircraft guns had devoured the birds, she would never hear them again. No dogs. No cats meowing, no crows cawing, no clatter from upstairs, no sounds of children downstairs, no errand boys running, no squeak of pushcarts, no clank against the door frame as the woman downstairs bumped her bucket coming into the building. Juudit had tried it, too, balancing the washbasin on her head, secretly, in front of the mirror, and wondered why the milliners didn’t design a hat that you could balance a little washbasin or bucket on. It would be a guaranteed success. Women were so childish, so foolish. A bucket hat was just the kind of crazy idea they needed right now. But that clank of tin, that ordinary life, was a thing of the past. Those buckets had been a mark of defeat, tainted by the Bolshevik occupation, but an ordinary thing nevertheless, with an ordinary sound.
    HER BROTHER JOHAN had taken her to her mother’s house on Valge Laeva Street in case anything happened, but the days had just continued. He and his wife had been taken away in June and Juudit hadn’t heard from them since, and strangers had moved into his house, important people from the commissariat. Juudit’s husband had been mobilized by the Red Army a long time ago. The woman who lived in the basement had been convicted of counterrevolutionary activity—accused of knowing that her renter was planning to leave the country. Juudit had been interrogated about it, too. And yet the days continued, even after that, and as they continued they became ordinary days, and even those days were better than these days of destruction. Out in the country, at Aunt Leonida’s house, Rosalie went right on milking the cows, even as her fiancé’s family was terrorized. The Simsons’ farm had been taken away; Roland’s father had been arrested and his mother, Anna, had moved to the Armses’ place so Rosalie could take care of her. Juudit was grateful to Rosalie for that. She wouldn’t have been able to cope with Anna Simson, not even in an emergency.
    She didn’t have Rosalie’s patience. If Juudit’s husband knew about it, he would have one more thing to complain about, would say that Anna didn’t deserve such an uncaring attitude from her favorite nephew’s wife. Maybe not, but Rosalie could fuss over Anna better than Juudit could, and Rosalie would fill the house with little darlings soon enough to make her happy. That was something that Juudit would never see happen.
    She tried to think of a sound from the past, something to be the last thing she thought of before the end. Maybe a day in her childhood, the ordinary noises of Rosalie in the kitchen, the sounds of a morning like all the other mornings of that peaceful time, when you knew that today