Of course, she told me. It took almost a year; almost a year of nightmares and of waking at odd hours, stumbling about in the darkness, uncertain of who was still with us and who was gone. Aunt Juudit. Joachim. Olga. Etti. Jakob. Uncertain too of where we were. Tartu. Kreenholm. Helsinki, where Jaan’s boat left us, speeding away while we stumbled towards the safehouse Oskar had organised, run by a volunteer group of women who spoke both Finnish and English and helped displaced persons claim refugee status. It was those women who encouraged us to travel to America. And now we are here: Manhattan.
The New World. As if the old one is so easily forgotten.
Wrapped up in a bedsheet to stave off the cold, the stories poured out of her. Extraordinary tales of a life spent beneath the shadow of the Kremlin. A world I could not imagine. A mother forced to abandon her heritage. A father who lied to protect himself. A nursemaid who had spun tales of brave girls who outsmarted witches and found their destiny in far-flung places. When she tried to speak of Jakob, how he had made her feel, at last a part of something greater, connected to the place where she belonged, she had found her voice choked by tears.
Those early times were the worst, for both of us. Grief was all around. Any small thing could bring it down over our heads. Our only shelter lay in each other, in the child growing daily in Lydia’s womb and in the care of Leelo, a bright spark.
As if summoned, there is the thunder of feet in the room next door and a twelve-year-old girl with a heart-shaped face bursts into the room, braids swinging.
‘You’re back!’ she trills, her hands already reaching for the biscuits. Lydia smacks gently at her fingers.
‘Patience,’ she says. Leelo purses her lips and I catch a glimpse of the adolescent she will become – challenging, questioning. A child who has forgotten the last years of the war and knows only freedom. At least we will always have the singing to tempt her with; the lessons she started a few years ago with Mrs Meelis down the hall have been a miracle for us, a way to reason with her and to bargain. When Leelo sings, it’s as though a hundred women are singing with her, a chorus of voices reaching through time to be heard.
‘Where is your shadow?’ Lydia says.
Leelo sighs and pulls a face. ‘Reading. I told him it’s boring, but you know… he never listens.’
I catch a glimpse of Lydia’s smile as she pulls the last item from the basket – a jar of strawberry jam – and places it on the pantry shelf. ‘Leave him, then,’ she says and I see him in her mind’s eye: a serious child of eleven, cloistered in his room poring over the books of maps we have borrowed for him from the local library. He traces their borders with his fingers as if they are marks that will lead to treasure.
‘Did you get anything else?’ Leelo cranes forward. ‘A present?’ Her eyes gleam.
‘Maybe.’ Lydia taps her fingers on the countertop. ‘But it’s for your aunt.’
I can’t hide my surprise. ‘For me?’
In answer, Lydia brings out two soft balls of yarn, places them in my hands.
‘For knitting circle,’ she says, a smile teasing the edge of her mouth. ‘Estonian wool.’
My breath catches. I finger the yarn softly, aware of Lydia watching me. Memories turn in my mind like Catherine wheels at the Fourth of July parade. Soft sheep’s fleece between my hands. Crunch of apple. Mama’s soft admonishing voice, Papa’s pipe smoke. Jakob’s smile. Oskar’s blue eyes watching me.
I realise my hands are trembling. Murmuring my thanks, I leave the kitchen behind and step into the parlour where my knitting things are kept. It’s a comfortable room; my favourite. Plenty of armchairs. A basket overflowing with wool – although none of it is Estonian. I can’t imagine where Lydia found it. We don’t hear much these days. Since the Germans lost the war and the Russians reclaimed it, Estonia has been hidden behind the Soviet wall again. When the women who come to sit with us and knit in the evenings ask me about what it is like there, I tell them about the way it was, before the Russians arrived, before the Nazis. The way I want to remember it.
My grandmother’s Estonia.
The sound of the front door slamming makes me jump. The wool falls from my hand, unravelling on the floor. I bend and begin to wind it. Before I can straighten, arms slide around my waist. The smell of woodshavings prickles my nose. I close my eyes, inhale deeply. It is a good scent.
‘Tere, Kati.’ Strong hands turn me around, so that we are facing each other. And then Oskar kisses the tender place on my neck beneath my ear, his lips soft. ‘Hello.’
His eyes are warm, like the ocean at sunset, when the sun spills across the waves, reluctant to cede the sky to the moon. There are marks on his body, small scars and burns. All of them healed a long time ago. Only I see the invisible ones. Only I can help him when he wakes weeping, shivering in a cold sweat as he remembers the people he has killed and the things he has seen. For a long time, he claimed it was the reason we could not have children. That fate was punishing him. We saw doctors but nobody could find a reason. It seemed to confirm for him what he suspected to be true.
He glances at the wool in my hand and raises his blond eyebrows. ‘Knitting? Again?’
I toss the wool in my hand, like a baseball player. ‘Of course,’ I say.
He shakes his head. ‘You are always thinking of knitting.’
I run one hand through his hair, woodshavings coarse beneath my fingertips. There is no heavy darkness in moments like this. There is only pleasure, weightless like the wool in my other hand. ‘Not always.’
His face breaks open in a grin. He thinks I am being coy. He doesn’t know what I know; what I have been waiting all day to tell him.
I allow my hand to hover near my still-flat belly, wondering if our child will have blue eyes or green. Oskar’s overalls are stained with oily varnish from his work at the furniture maker’s shop a block away. When he presses me to him, though, I do not resist.
Long after we are gone, our souls remain.
They live in the trees we touched, the sigh of the wind we listened for. They exist not only to comfort our loved ones, but to comfort us, the parts of us that still watch and need strength. There is thread that binds us, all of the living things, to the past. It winds about us, sometimes playfully, sometimes twisting us in knots, tying us painfully to those memories that are heavy as stones. Sometimes it’s an oak leaf in your hand. You pick it up. You remember. Sometimes it’s a kringle pastry. You place it on your tongue. Those sweet times you shared.
Sometimes, it’s a simple thing. An item you wear every day.
A shawl.
The folds of it brim with memories, good and bad. You wind it about your neck. It sits just so. It’s so soft you can wrap it around the body of a newborn child; a baptism of wool, a protection of holy lace. You can pull it through your wedding band, a band of burnished gold as brilliant as your husband’s hair. A simple trick that makes him smile, although the wounds are never far from the surface. They are the scars we all carry, those of us who left our hearts in another place.
One day we will go back.
Until then, we sing songs and tell stories to our children, to Leelo and to Anton. We knit together in the darkest hours before dawn, when the silence is too great to bear alone. One stitch at a time. That’s what I tell myself. What I say to Lydia when she appears at my door, her hand balled around the yarn.
With every stitch, we heal ourselves.
Acknowledgements