“You bastard! You shit!” said the boys and kicked him in the head, the back… He thought he’d be able to overcome them if he only let go of the briefcase, but he mustn’t because it contained the book and without the book he’d have no reason to go to Natalya Filippovna’s… Thinking that thought he began to sink as if into soft cotton. He felt the boys turning him over, rummaging through his breast pockets. “Just like doctors do…” he thought, perceiving even through thick clothes how wonderful, clever, human hands were, all the things they could do… He could feel how he was distending, stretching out in every direction, swelling into a great blain that held everything within it, the whole of this world… It was the very feeling he had always yearned for – that he could embrace the earth, encompass its lovely blue globe, as lovely as Natalya Filippovna?
Sofia hurried home – over the snowy wasteland. She could have stayed on the bus until the next stop – although the bus would have taken her on round the curve, it would still have brought her back more quickly than she could have managed on foot – but she wanted to walk, and she wanted specifically to cross the broad snowy field that both enticed and horrified her. Especially now, in the dark, when only the moon lit the snow-trampled path. Cold, pallid light as if everything was not real, just a dream… And the moon itself was no smooth shining disc, it bulged as if a shadow had been cast on it, as if Zhanna’s rat were holding it in the sky with its little paws… As soon as she remembered the rat though she felt a grip tightening round her throat, as if she were guilty of something. Why did she always feel guilty? As she did when Rael’s grandma talked about the earth people worry themselves to death about… Or when the papers reported that the Estonians would die out because of falling numbers… She had once asked Rael’s grandma why people should worry about a small nation like the Estonians, if the whole world was going to perdition and turning into deserts… And she’d had the feeling that Grandma had looked at her reprovingly.
She might have been wrong though, because Grandma had replied, “Well, my dear, I’m an old lady but see, my children are still looking after me, they haven’t bundled me off, even Rael comes to visit – but what’s the point of it? Is there even a point?” This answer made the topic so intricate that it seemed to have flummoxed even Grandma.
So perhaps the Estonians should look after themselves in the same way that Rael’s dad was looking after his mum? As if they were looking after a little old lady who would live her allotted span?
The nursery rhyme began to go round and round in her head; it had dug its way in there for some reason and just kept going round and round – as if the person who had come up with it was Sofia herself, although not her true self, but a different, spiteful version of herself that seemed to tease and mock her with the rhyme, in time with her steps…
“The Battle of Paju,” she repeated back, over and over again, “the Battle of Paju…” slowly and convincingly, because this moonlit field, dotted with the odd shrub, was just like a battlefield after the battle: empty, silent, desolate – perhaps there was the odd frozen corpse buried somewhere under the snow…
Over the field, along the snow-trampled path, two dark shapes were running towards her: men, one large and one small; they stood by the leafless willow shrubs and began to do something to a box or briefcase that the larger one was holding. Sofia thought the smart thing to do would be to turn back or away – who knows what they might decide to get up to and there didn’t appear to be another living soul on the field – in this cold everyone preferred to go by bus, not trek across the field… But somehow it felt inappropriate to turn round and leg it – not that she would have been ashamed to reveal her fear, but it felt ugly to suspect someone when there perhaps were no grounds to do so… As she walked, she looked straight ahead and not towards them at all, and she moved very quickly as if she hadn’t even noticed them…
It was impossible to pass them like that though – the path took a dog-leg around the shrubs and they were busy right there behind the shrubs, muttering angrily, “There’s nothing, nothing at all…” One of them kicked the briefcase away and it landed just in front of Sofia. Sofia stopped and raised her gaze – it was Venya and Tolik.
“What are you two doing here?” she asked, cheering up for a moment because she knew them, even though they were Tolik and Venya.
“Ha!” said Venya, and as if in relief, “rubbish… you see…” and fell perplexedly quiet.
But Tolik, small and thin, approached her slowly as if prowling, slightly stooped, panting, with wide-open eyes that glowed strangely but coldly.
“Listen, we need money, right now! You’ve got money!”
Sofia took a small purse out of her belt bag. Her hand was shaking. “How does he know I’ve got money?” was the thought that flashed across her mind – her only banknote was a large five-hundred-kroon one that Rael had given her that evening, a whole month’s money! But that wasn’t important right now because she sensed that this money was a matter of life and death – not for her, but for the boys. She sensed that something very dreadful might have happened to them, and might still, if she did not hand over the money; she would have given more if she’d had it…
“Good girl,” said Tolik slightly more calmly, slightly less uptight, “look have this, take this book for it!”
And he offered Sofia a thick book.
Now suddenly Sofia was gripped by a frantic fear and broke into a run, crying with the book under her arm; her fear was completely irrational because the boys were hurrying away in the exact opposite direction.
She ran and ran without stopping as far as the building where she lived and up the stairs. It never entered her head that she could wait for the lift; she searched for her keys in her pocket mid-run, rattled them in the door to open it and once in the hall sank on to the chair in the corner.
Mum came into the hall wearing a surprised expression. Mum looked ready for a party, she was wearing her silk blouse – the one with the pale red and gold spots that she never wore at home. Mum was beautiful – bedecked in the palest of pale blue summer skies and reddening flowers and golden sunshine… Her loveliness and festiveness made Sofia burst into tears, sobbing and shaking.
“What’s the matter?” asked Mum, really frightened.
“I don’t know. Something dreadful’s happened!”
“Who with?”
“Those boys.”
“What boys?”
“Them. Venya and Tolik. I gave them money.”
“They took money from you?”
“No, I gave them it, they needed it… They really needed it right away.”
“What happened after that?”
“I don’t know, something dreadful…”
Mum helped her up and led her to a chair at the kitchen table; she poured some hot water from a flask into a cup and stirred several spoonfuls of sugar into it. The good sweet warmth flowed across her whole body. It was incompatible with the fear thrashing within her, supplanting it a little too forcefully, through the back of her head, and out… Yet it didn’t work as well as usual because an anguish bubbled up into her throat from somewhere deep inside her chest and made her sob. Mum took some of her own more powerful herbs from the cupboard as well – valerian – and soaked a sugar lump thoroughly in it. This and the hot water helped. Or the warmth in the room and time itself helped. Sofia yawned. She remembered the way the rat had yawned: hurriedly but otherwise exactly as a human would. The rat didn’t make her cry any more, instead she thought, a little sadly, that people were not much bigger than rats… She felt that she knew what it would be like to be a rat…