Purge

Sofi Oksanen, Lola Rogers

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780857890528
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A blowfly. Unusually large, loud, and eager to lay its eggs. It was lying in wait to get into the kitchen, rubbing its wings and feet against the curtain as if preparing to feast. It was after meat, nothing else but meat. Deep in an overgrown Estonian forest, two women, one young, one old, are hiding. Zara, a murderer and a victim of sex-trafficking, is on the run from brutal captors. Aliide, a communist sympathizer and a blood traitor, has endured a life of abuse and the country's brutal Soviet years. Their survival now depends on exposing the one thing that kept them hidden... the truth.

Table of Contents

PART ONE

Free Estonia!

The Fly Always Wins

Zara Searches for a Likely Story

Aliide Prepares a Bath

Zara Admires Some Shiny Stockings and Tastes Some Gin

Every Clink of the Knife Rings Mockingly

In the Wardrobe Is Grandmother’s Suitcase, and in the Suitcase Is Grandmother’s Quilted Coat

Zara Thinks of an Emergency Plan and Aliide Lays Her Traps

Zara Puts on a Red Leather Skirt and Learns Some Manners

Fear Comes Home for the Evening

After the Rocks Come the Songs

Aliide Finds Ingel’s Brooch and Is Horrified

Pasha’s Car Is Getting Closer and Closer

The Photograph That Zara’s Grandmother Gave Her

Thieves’ Tales Only Interest Other Thieves

PART TWO

Free Estonia!

Aliide Eats a Five-Petaled Lilac and Falls in Love

Granny Kreel’s Crows Go Silent

From the Tumult of the Front to the Scent of Syrup

First Let’s Make Some Curtains

Are You Sure, Comrade Aliide?

Aliide Is Going to Need a Cigarette

They Walked in Like They Owned the Place

Aliide’s Bed Begins to Smell of Onions

How Aliide’s Step Became Lighter

The Trials of Aliide Truu

Hans Doesn’t Strike Aliide, Although He Could Have

Aliide Saves a Piece of Ingel’s Wedding Blanket

Even the Movie Man’s Girl Has a Future

Diagnosis

PART THREE

Free Estonia!

The Loneliness of Aliide Truu

A Girl Like a Spring Day

Even a Dog Can’t Chew Through the Chain of Heredity

Aliide Wants to Sleep Through the Night in Peace

Martin Is Proud of His Daughter

Suffering Washes Memory Clean

The Smell of Cod Liver, the Yellow Light of a Lamp

Zara Finds a Spinning Wheel and Sourdough Starter

The Price of Bitter Dreams

Zara Looks Out the Window and Feels the Itch, the Call of the Road

Why Hasn’t Zara Killed Herself?

Zara Looks for a Road with an Unusual Number of Silver Willows at Its End

PART FOUR

Free Estonia!

How Can They See to Fly in the Dark?

Aliide Writes Letters Full of Good News

Aliide Rescues the Sugar Bowl Before It Falls

Hans Tastes Mosquitoes in His Mouth

Zara Finds Some Dead Flowers

Aliide Is Almost Starting to Like the Girl

Why Can’t Hans Love Aliide?

What Did Ingel Tell the Girl About Aliide?

The Passport Kept in the Breast Pocket

The Girl Has Hans’s Chin

Aliide Rubs Her Hands with Goose Fat

Free Estonia!

Free Estonia!

Aliide Kisses Hans and Wipes Blood from the Floor

Free Estonia!

Aliide’s Beautiful Estonian Forest

Free Estonia!

Aliide Packs Up Her Recipe Book and Gets Ready for Bed

PART FIVE

Free Estonia!

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Top Secret

Free Estonia!

PART ONE

There is an answer for everything,
if only one knew the question

—Paul-Eerik Rummo

MAY 1949

Free Estonia!

I have to try to write a few words to keep some sense in my head and not let my mind break down. I’ll hide my notebook here under the floor so no one will find it, even if they do find me. This is no life for a man to live. People need people, someone to talk to. I try to do a lot of pushups, take care of my body, but I’m not a man anymore—I’m dead. A man should do the work of the household, but in my house a woman does it. It’s shameful.

Liide’s always trying to get closer to me. Why won’t she leave me alone? She smells like onions.

What’s keeping the English? And what about America? Everything’s balanced on a knife edge—nothing is certain.

Where are my girls, Linda and Ingel? The misery is more than I can bear.

Hans Pekk, son of Eerik, Estonian peasant

1992
LÄÄNEMAA, ESTONIA

The Fly Always Wins

Aliide Truu stared at the fly, and the fly stared back. Its eyes bulged and Aliide felt sick to her stomach. A blowfly. Unusually large, loud, and eager to lay its eggs. It was lying in wait to get into the kitchen, rubbing its wings and feet against the curtain as if preparing to feast. It was after meat, nothing else but meat. The jam and all the other canned goods were safe—but that meat. The kitchen door was closed. The fly was waiting. Waiting for Aliide to tire of chasing it around the room, to give up, open the kitchen door. The flyswatter struck the curtain. The curtain fluttered, the lace flowers crumpled, and carnations flashed outside the window, but the fly got away and was strutting on the window frame, safely above Aliide’s head. Self-control! That’s what Aliide needed now, to keep her hand steady.

The fly had woken her up in the morning by walking across her forehead, as carefree as if she were a highway, contemptuously baiting her. She had pushed aside the covers and hurried to close the door to the kitchen, which the fly hadn’t yet thought to slip through. Stupid fly. Stupid and loathsome.

Aliide’s hand clenched the worn, smooth handle of the flyswatter, and she swung it again. Its cracked leather hit the glass, the glass shook, the curtain clips jangled, and the wool string that held up the curtains sagged behind the valance, but the fly escaped again, mocking her. In spite of the fact that Aliide had been trying for more than an an hour to do away with it, the fly had beaten her in every attack, and now it was flying next to the ceiling with a greasy buzz. A disgusting blowfly from the sewer drain. She’d get it yet. She would rest a bit, then do away with it and concentrate on listening to the radio and canning. The raspberries were waiting, and the tomatoes—juicy, ripe tomatoes. The harvest had been exceptionally good this year.

Aliide straightened the drapes. The rainy yard was sniveling gray; the limbs of the birch trees trembled wet, leaves flattened by the rain, blades of grass swaying, with drops of water dripping from their tips. And there was something underneath them. A mound of something. Aliide drew away, behind the shelter of the curtain. She peeked out again, pulled the lace curtain in front of her so that she couldn’t be seen from the yard, and held her breath. Her gaze bypassed the fly specks on the glass and focused on the lawn in front of the birch tree that had been split by lightning.

The mound wasn’t moving and there was nothing familiar about it except its size. Her neighbor Aino had once seen a light above the same birch tree when she was on her way to Aliide’s house, and she hadn’t dared come all the way there, instead returning home to call Aliide and ask if everything was all right, if there had been a UFO in Aliide’s yard. Aliide hadn’t noticed anything unusual, but Aino had been sure that the UFOs were in front of Aliide’s house, and at Meelis’s house, too. Meelis had talked about nothing but UFOs after that. The mound looked like it came from this world, however—it was darkened by rain, it fit into the terrain, it was the size of a person. Maybe some drunk from the village had passed out in her yard. But wouldn’t she have heard if someone were making a racket under her window? Aliide’s ears were still sharp. And she could smell old liquor fumes even through walls. A while ago a bunch of drunks from the next house over had driven out on a tractor with some stolen gasoline, and you couldn’t help but notice the noise. They had driven through her ditch several times and almost taken her fence with them. There was nothing but UFOs, old men, and dim-witted hooligans around here anymore. Her neighbor Aino had come to spend the night at her house numerous times when those boys’ goings-on got too crazy. Aino knew that Aliide wasn’t afraid of them—she’d stand up to them if she had to.

Aliide put the flyswatter that her father had made on the table and crept to the kitchen door, took hold of the latch, but then remembered the fly. It was quiet now. It was waiting for Aliide to open the kitchen door. She went back to the window. The mound was still in the yard, in the same position as before. It looked like a person—she could make out the light hair against the grass. Was it even alive? Aliide’s chest tightened; her heart started to thump in its sack. Should she go out to the yard? Or would that be stupid, rash? Was the mound a thief’s trick? No, no, it couldn’t be. She hadn’t been lured to the window, no one had knocked at the front door. If it weren’t for the fly, she wouldn’t even have noticed it before it was gone. But still. The fly was quiet. She listened. The loud hum of the refrigerator blotted out the silence of the barn that seeped through from the other side of the food pantry. She couldn’t hear the familiar buzz. Maybe the fly had stayed in the other room. Aliide lit the stove, filled the teakettle, and switched on the radio. They were talking about the presidential elections and in a moment would be the more important weather report. Aliide wanted to spend the day inside, but the mound, visible out of the corner of her eye through the kitchen window, disturbed her. It looked the same as it had from the bedroom window, just as much like a person, and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere on its own. Aliide turned off the radio and went back to the window. It was quiet, the way it’s quiet in late summer in a dying Estonian village—a neighbor’s rooster crowed, that was all. The silence had been peculiar that year—expectant, yet at the same time like the aftermath of a storm. There was something similar in the posture of Aliide’s grass, overgrown, sticking to the windowpane. It was wet and mute, placid.

She scratched at her gold tooth, poked at the gap between her teeth with her fingernail—there was something stuck there—and listened, but all she heard was the scrape of her nail against bone, and suddenly she felt it, a shiver up her back. She stopped digging between her teeth and focused on the mound. The specks on the window annoyed her. She wiped at them with a gauze rag, threw the rag in the dishpan, took her coat from the rack and put it on, remembered her handbag on the table and snapped it up, looked around for a good place to hide it, and shoved it in the cupboard with the dishes. On top of the cupboard was a bottle of Finnish deodorant. She hid that away, too, and even put the lid on the sugar bowl, out of which peeped Imperial Leather soap. Only then did she turn the key silently in the lock of the inner door and push it open. She stopped in the entryway, picked up the juniper pitchfork handle that served as a walking stick, but exchanged it for a machine-made city stick, put that down, too, and chose a scythe from among the tools in the entryway. She leaned it against the wall for a moment, smoothed her hair, adjusted a hairpin, tucked her hair neatly behind her ears, took hold of the scythe again, moved the curtain away from the front of the door, turned the latch, and stepped outside.

The mound was lying in the same spot under the birch tree. Aliide moved closer, keeping her eye on the mound but also keeping an eye out for any others. It was a girl. Muddy, ragged, and bedraggled, but a girl nevertheless. A completely unknown girl. A flesh-and-blood person, not some omen of the future, sent from heaven. Her red-lacquered fingernails were in shreds. Her eye makeup had run down her cheeks and her curls were half straightened; there were little blobs of hairspray in them, and a few silver willow leaves stuck to them. Her hair was bleached until it was coarse, and had greasy, dark roots. But under the dirt her skin seemed over-ripe, her cheek white, transparent. Tatters of skin were torn from her dry lower lip, and between them the lip swelled tomato red, unnaturally bright and bloody-looking, making the grime look like a coating, something to be wiped off like the cold, waxy surface of an apple. Purple had collected in the folds of her eyelids, and her black, translucent stockings had runs in them. They didn’t bag at the knees—they were tight-knit, good stockings. Definitely Western. The knit shone in spite of the mud. One shoe had fallen off and lay on the ground. It was a bedroom slipper, worn at the heel, with a flannel lining rubbed to gray pills. The binding along the edge was decorated with dog-eared patent-leather rick-rack and a pair of nickel rivets. Aliide had once had a pair just like them. The rickrack had been pink when it was new, and it looked sweet; the lining was soft and pink like the side of a new pig. It was a Soviet slipper. The dress? Western. The tricot was too good to come from over on the other side. You couldn’t get them anywhere but in the West. The last time her daughter Talvi had come back from Finland she had had one like it, with a broad belt. Talvi had said that it was in style, and she certainly knew about fashion. Aino got a similar one from the church care package, although it was no use to her—but after all, it was free. The Finns had enough clothes that they even threw new ones away into the collection bin. The package had also contained a Windbreaker and some T-shirts. Soon it would be time to pick up another one. But this girl’s dress was really too handsome to be from a care package. And she wasn’t from around here.

There was a flashlight next to her head. And a muddy map.

Her mouth was open, and as she leaned closer, Aliide could see her teeth. They were too white. The gaps between her white teeth formed a line of gray spots.

Her eyes twitched under their lids.

Aliide poked the girl with the end of the scythe, but there was no movement. Yoo-hoos didn’t get any flicker from the girl’s eyelids, neither did pinching. Aliid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• Contents