She paused, looking ahead. I could see she was struggling to conceal her emotions. It was always the same for me when I had to speak of Olga, or if I was thinking about Jakob. The same stare which held all the things that it was unsafe to say. I knew Kati was thinking of her mother – and Oskar.
‘What do you know about the factory?’ I said, hoping to distract her.
Kati swallowed visibly. ‘Not a lot,’ she admitted. ‘Everybody’s heard of it, of course. Kreenholm. But Papa never told us any stories about it.’
‘My cousin’s wife worked there once,’ the woman with white hair said. ‘Before she moved south. There were ten thousand people employed there once.’ She paused to let this settle. ‘It’s a huge place. Built on an island surrounded by a vast river. There are three buildings, she told me,’ the woman went on. ‘A textile mill, a spinning room and a weaving factory. Water turbines keep the machinery turning. There are probably more now than when she worked there. Those Russians knew how to industrialise.’
‘Maybe,’ said one girl with a constellation of freckles smattering her nose. ‘But they knew nothing about clothes! When they arrived in Rakvere and occupied the houses left behind, some of the wives were heard to exclaim that they had never before seen so many varieties of clothing. All the Soviet clothes came from the one factory and they were all the same colour and the same shape. The Partorg in our area held a banquet at the Town Hall and invited all the Russian officials who’d just moved in; their wives showed up in nightgowns the Estonians had abandoned. They thought they were ball gowns!’
Some of the women snuffled with laughter.
‘That’s just a rumour.’ The woman with the white hair smiled at me. ‘I’m Jelena Ilves.’
‘Lydia Androvna,’ I told her, feeling only a slight twinge of guilt at the lie. Anyone who remembered the Partorg would surely connect us. All the same, Green Kerchief swivelled her gaze to me. ‘This is my friend, Katarina Mägi, and her cousin, Etti. And the little dumpling you see there is Leelo.’
I grasped awkwardly for the hand Jelena extended. Her fingers were careworn and roughened. The truck rounded a bend and she laughed as our hands slipped apart.
‘I imagine we will be seeing quite a bit of each other.’ Jelena glanced around the truck. ‘All of us. Best we know who our new companions are sooner than later.’
‘I’m Agnese Rosenberg.’ The woman in the green kerchief raised her chin. Her eyes glittered defiantly in the dim cavern beneath eyebrows plucked so thin they were almost invisible. Something tugged at me. A memory, a whisper. I almost spoke aloud in my head, asking Mama. But she’d been silent ever since the day after the deportations, the day of Etti’s birth when I had sung her song and imagined her holding me for the first time. It was almost as if the pure intensity of that moment had severed our connection.
I tried to study Agnese. Had I seen her at the bakery? But the woman had already withdrawn into the darker shadows at the edge of the truck.
Other women called out from the semi-darkness, their voices mingling. Some sounded resigned, others hopeful. I couldn’t begin to know their motivations for coming to Kreenholm. They were all women like Etti and Kati. If it were not for their names and accents, which pinned them down to different geographic regions, I doubted that anyone would be able to tell them apart in the dark. It was only my accent which seemed unusual. All those years in Moscow made it impossible for me to speak Estonian with the ease of someone who had lived here all her life. I cautioned myself again to speak only when necessary. It was dangerous now to draw attention to anything which was at odds. A few weeks, that was all we needed to stay. A month at most. As long as it took Oskar to organise our passage and send word to us that it was time to run. We did not need to make friends.
Suddenly, Kati stiffened. ‘Kreenholm,’ she said, her head tilted to one side. ‘Listen.’ She gripped my arm. ‘Can you hear it?’
The truck rumbled to a halt and the sound rose up beneath the throbbing engine. The roar of water. The churn of turbines. Lapping of waves against stone.
Twisting, I pulled back the flap of canvas again. The sunlight dazzled my eyes as I made out stacked chimneys, brick red. Huge buildings that rocketed skywards so I had to duck my head to fit them into view. A set of vast doors atop a flight of stone stairs.
And before it all, a pair of tall black iron gates loomed between two brick parapets.
German voices rang out as our driver spoke to the guard. Seconds later, the truck lurched forward as we crossed the threshold and mounted the small bridge that separated the township of Narva from the Kreenholm factory.
A small cry of relief rose up as the doors were unbarred and we tumbled out. Some women groaned as they unfolded themselves, rubbing joints made stiff with travel over the bumpy roads. Etti was smiling – the first genuine smile I had seen from her in weeks. Jelena chucked Leelo under the chin and Etti looked on indulgently. Kati, too, seemed pleased at first, although I saw her frown up at the buildings, so vast above us, almost as if they were built for giants from one of Olga’s fairy tales.
I tried to look up, to see the place where the buildings met the sky but my neck resisted, cramping painfully. The German officer loudly instructed the women to move forward into the building and assemble. A noise broke the sound of feet shuffling towards the doors. It was the cawing of birds. I looked around and spied crows clustered on the bare branches of a tree in a flowerbed rampant with weeds. At least a dozen creatures, beaks tipped open, feathers ruffled by the breeze. Their black liquid eyes watched us impassively.
An arm slipped suddenly through mine. ‘Pay them no attention.’ Jelena’s face was sour with dislike. ‘I never cared for crows, either. But my mother always said if you leave them alone, they will find other people to bother. And my mother was a smart woman.’ Applying slight pressure to my arm, she began to coax me towards the doors.
From the top of the steps, I could look back at the road that had brought us here. Rows of narrow houses lined the street beyond the gates. Flowerbeds heaped against their walls, late-blooming roses, bright as jewels, and brown spikes of seeding lavender. I could hear, but not see the water yet. I felt the ground shudder as the turbines spun.
It all looked so normal. Compared to Tartu’s streets with their undercurrent of terror, it even seemed appealing, the rush of the water cleansing everything. A place of new hope, even if for just a few weeks until Oskar arranged our escape.
The crows were the only blight on the peaceful view.
Jelena squeezed my arm. ‘You mustn’t let them disturb you. This is their place, after all.’
‘What do you mean?’
She gave a small shrug. ‘Kreenholm. Roughly translated: crow island. Isle of Crows, my cousin’s wife said.’
A prickle ran beneath my skin. Island of crows. Island of dead things and carrion flesh. I wondered what Olga would have made of that. I heard her voice. A bird taps the window three times: death is coming.
Before I could speak, Jelena had tugged me inside. The doors clanged shut behind us as the German officer from the truck shifted in behind us to stand guard.
Ahead, I could see Kati’s plait swinging at her back. Etti stood beside her, soothing the grizzling Leelo with soft words. I made my way towards them, Jelena beside me. A long timber staircase wound up to the next level of the building. The other women were murmuring to each other, but their voices died when a man descended the stairs and paused a few steps from the bottom. He did not seem embarrassed to be half-dressed. A white starched shirt tucked into olive trousers and a silk brocade waistcoat cinched around his waist. A half-sewn jacket was slung casually over his clothes. One sleeve was missing, the other hung loosely, held together with pins. My heart caught when I saw the swastika symbol emblazoned on the armband as if a spider had found its way onto the fabric and been ironed in by mistake.