When the Doves Disappeared by Sofi Oksanen Page A

managed very well, hanging on to my mother’s skirts. She had always wanted another child to keep her company, and the two of them took to each other. They were both supposedly sickly. We had another word for it: lazy.
    When Edgar recovered from the sight of two dead bodies, he showed surprising initiative and said he would dispose of them. I doubted he could accomplish such a thing, but I helped him get the corpses into the cart and he hauled them away somewhere. The next day he came back looking shifty, with a poorly hidden grin on his face. He wasn’t in any hurry anymore to get to town until the fighting in the woods died down. I could tell he had invented some story about the bodies so that we’d be left in peace. Sooner or later the Germans would have started to wonder what Finland-trained spies like us were doing lurking around in a cabin in the woods if he hadn’t made some kind of deal with them, convinced them that they had nothing to fear from us. Maybe now was the time to ask what was going on between him and the Germans, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to him about it. He would be so pleased if I showed some interest in his affairs, and I didn’t want to see the flattered look on his face. I saw that there was a knot in the reins, untied it, and went into the house to look for an awl and some waxed thread to splice it together. I felt the Hungarian leather, thought I ought to grease the harnesses, and the thought made me homesick for the fields, and frustrated. If the Germans weren’t able to return the land that the Russians took or bring back the people, they were of no use to me, no matter what my cousin said. I thought again about the tobacco field that some Bolshevik bastard had dumped night soil on to grow who knows what, and a horse with a hunger pit so deep that I couldn’t see how it managed to pull the wagon. Edgar didn’t notice things like that. When we were standing by the spoiled field, all he did was wonder at the smell. That field had once been our land, the Simson land, and that horse had once been my horse, a horse who’d worn a blue ribbon next to his ear at the agricultural fair year after year. I would have recognized that horse anywhere, and he recognized me, but we had to let the field be and let the horse go on his way.
    Edgar followed me to the cabin, lit a lamp after rubbing the soot off its hood a bit, and continued reading aloud where he’d left off. Did he want me to approve of what he was doing? He wanted something from me, but what?
    “You’re not listening,” he said.
    “What do you want?”
    “I want us to start planning our lives, of course.”
    “And what does the Commissar General have to do with it?”
    “You have to get new identity papers, just like everybody else. They’ve given orders about it. I can help you.”
    “I don’t need any advice from Mr. Wurst.”
    “Auntie Anna wouldn’t like it if I didn’t look out for you.”
    The idea made me laugh. Edgar was getting cheeky.
    “You’re well suited for the police force,” he said. “You ought to apply now. They’re in serious need of new men.”
    “That’s not for me.”
    “Roland, all the Bolsheviks have been cleared out. The work is easy and you wouldn’t have to join the German army. Isn’t that why you’re still sitting here? What is it you’re hoping for?”
    Finally I sensed what he was getting at. Now that the time for muscle and gunpowder had passed and the ranks of the police needed filling, he saw his opportunity. I looked at him and saw a glitter of greed in his eyes: the Baltic barons were gone, and so were the Bolsheviks and the leaders of the republic. Empty leadership positions, just waiting for him. That’s why he’d been acting so important, that’s what he’d been holding in. My cousin had always considered the German gentry superior, admired the bicycles imported from Berlin, gone crazy over their video-telephones. He even arranged his sentences sometimes in