Death of a Nightingale by Lene Kaaberbøl Page B

impossible. No matter how hard she tried, they often drifted into black areas and made her think that she might be a kulak, or on her way to becoming one. There were things she wished to have, even though no one was supposed to own anything. Bread and silk dresses and shiny headbands. And Semienova.
    That was why she had begged and made a spectacle of herself—as Jana put it—until she had been included in one of the photographs taken when Oxana had been chosen as the school’s model student in September. Semienova got the
Pioneer
magazine to come all the way to Mykolayevka. Of course, only the picture of Oxana made it into the newspaper, but Semienova had also asked to have the other developed and had placed it next to her bed in the room behind the schoolroom. Olga knew that she was included because Semienova had felt sorry for her, but the picture was a nice one all the same, with Olga and Oxana in the beautiful and almostidentical traditional dresses Mother had sewn for them when they still lived in Kharkiv.
    Olga wished that she was the one Semienova had chosen to sing at the pioneer meeting, and she wished that Oxana wasn’t so beautiful, didn’t have such blue eyes and didn’t sing like the stupid, goddamn nightingale in the poplar tree down by the stream.
    O XANA ’ S CHEEKS WERE still blushing when they passed the last house in the village and continued on the dirt road between the hills.
    The trip to school was terribly long now, ever since they had moved out to Grandfather’s farm, and every day when they passed by the old house, Olga cursed the widow Svetlova and her bloated cow tits. All Jana had to do was run along to the Petrenkos’ house right next door, while Olga and Oxana had to trudge along the stream and over the rise. It was all right while it was summer and the road was dry and warm so that you could take off your socks and shoes and walk barefoot. But now it was September, and the rain had already transformed the road into two black muddy wheel tracks. Neither their bark shoes nor the extra socks could prevent the cold mud from getting all the way in between their toes as they walked. Disgusting.
    In addition, on the road to Grandfather’s, there were Former Human Beings who had dug themselves dirt hole shelters among the birch trees and sat staring at them with starving eyes as they passed by. Sometimes they whispered and hissed up there among the trunks, begging for bread—
“khleb, khleb”
—but mostly they just stared. The worst was the children wandering around with bloated bellies and sores on their arms and legs. Most of those children had disappeared during the winter. The ones who remained were more dead than alive, and Olga had more than once thought about giving them a piece of her bread.
    But hunger gnawed at her too—every day, all the time. Throughgruel and porridge and nettle soup. When she closed her eyes, she thought about all the things she had eaten when she was younger. Whole plates filled with potatoes roasted in oil. Salt pork and sausage and cheese and pierogi. It would all come back, Oxana said, and she also said that Olga had to be strong and save her bread for herself, because the children among the birches were already marked for death by scurvy and typhoid. No matter how much bread they ate now, they would die, crushed between the great millstones
golod
and
kholod
—hunger and cold. Olga could not ease their suffering with a single piece of bread. And Olga knew that Oxana was right. In the spring she had seen boys by the pond behind the house catching tadpoles and swallowing them live. That kind of hunger consumed everything and could not be satisfied by Olga’s two half-eaten crusts, and every time she had the thought, she let her bread slip back into her pocket and felt how her stomach, which at first had protested in panic, grew calm again.
    Once she had decided to keep the bread, she discovered that she actually hated the Former Human Beings. They had