Aunt Juudit appeared in the doorway of the apartment block holding a broom. Her hair had faded from the bright red I remembered from childhood – the same shade as the crimson geraniums spilling from the wooden planter boxes beside the door – to the dull silver of old coins. As I approached she continued to sing, oblivious to everything, swinging the broom and swaying her body in time with the music. She had a beautiful voice; a powerful alto-contralto, cultivated through many years of training at the Conservatory in Tallinn.
If she had continued, she might have gone on to be one of the greatest opera singers Estonia had ever known. But an unfortunate bout of bronchial illness had befallen her in her twenties, robbing her of breath. Her lungs had never been the same. She had come here to Tartu to live on the farm with my parents and Grandmother, before she met and married my uncle, a professor at the university. Although she had done her best to be content with a quiet life, it was not possible for her to give up singing altogether; music beat in her heart and pulsed in her veins. When our old choir mistress died, it was Aunt Juudit who took over, marching in with her record player in its box beneath her arm to teach us songs. Every fifth year she travelled back to Tallinn to sing with her old choir friends at laulupidu, the song festival, and when I was eight she had taken me with her. We had reached the stadium to find a brass band in full swing, the trumpeters blasting notes while the trombone players sent out rippling glissandos of sound. I heard hymns from Viljandi, fishing songs from island settlements like Saaremaa. My favourite was regilaul, runo song, which was poetry with a little melody mixed in. Like the sagas of Iceland, it told the stories of everyday people, but our runo was mostly sung by women, so the stories were flavoured with the preoccupations of women’s lives: births and deaths, betrayals. Hardships and heartbreak. All the things that had not changed in more than two thousand years since the first runo was sung.
Although there was a chance the song festival would go ahead in three years’ time, it would be the Russians who organised it. There would be no runo. L’Internationale was the Soviet-approved anthem now. Although I found its melody stirring, the meaning behind its popularity left a sour taste on my tongue. Its showy brass and bluster could never match the quiet power of ‘My Fatherland, My Happiness and Joy’, the song Estonians had chosen as their anthem, as a reminder of their independence and their faith, a song nobody dared to sing now in the face of arrest and execution or deportation. With a pang, I remembered what Papa had told me the day Oskar’s mother was murdered; all it took was one tune sung in front of the wrong people for the Russians to act. We were a tiny minority living on a knife’s edge.
Catching sight of me, my Aunt Juudit glanced up. A smile illuminated her features. A lace shawl was knotted around her neck, decorated with her signature pattern of peacock tails. She drew me to her side, and we sang the last line of the anthem together, Aunt Juudit’s soft, papery cheek pressed against my own.
The trumpets gave one final triumphant blast and faded away.
Above us, a window banged open. A man’s face appeared, grizzled features twisted into a scowl. He rubbed at his eyes with a scarred knuckle, cursing at us in heavily accented Russian.
Aunt Juudit radiated a smile. ‘Ah! Good morning, Mr Vachenko! Would you care to join us? It’s never too early for a bit of patriotism, is it?’
The old man’s eyes narrowed, but he clamped his lips shut. The glass rattled as he slammed the window closed.
Aunt Juudit turned to me, one eyebrow raised. ‘What do you think, Kati? Another round?’
I shook my head, trying not to smile.
Since her dismissal as choir mistress last year when the Soviets arrived, Aunt Juudit’s small rebellion was to play ‘L’Internationale’ as loudly as possible each morning.
‘Let them dare to complain,’ I’d heard her say. ‘Let them be dragged off for treason. It won’t be me!’
So far nobody had dared to complain; not the new Russian residents in the units above, nor any of the remaining Estonians in the surrounding buildings in this small corner of Tartu.
Aunt Juudit lifted her shoulders and sighed in mock disappointment. ‘Ah well. Another time, perhaps.’ She cupped my cheek. ‘It’s good to see you, Kati. I was starting to worry.’
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t catch a lift this morning. It seems all the lorries were headed in the other direction.’
Waving off my apology, my aunt picked up the broom and shuffled backwards to prop open the door. ‘Never mind. Come in, come in. The others are waiting.’ As I began to move past her she reached out to squeeze my arm and lowered her voice. ‘Kati, Viktoria has finished the pasqueflower shawl at last. Make a fuss, won’t you? You know how fragile she is. I think, between you and me, that she’s finally starting to improve.’
A fresh chord of guilt plucked at my heart. How could I tell them about the wool?
I scurried past before Aunt Juudit had a chance to say more.
The apartment was not a large one; there was no grand entrance. The door opened straight into the cosy parlour. Although from the outside the apartment seemed quiet and unassuming, inside it was a hive of activity on a morning like this, the last meeting of knitting circle before the market next week. Women were crammed into every available space. Some, like my cousin Etti, were squashed into armchairs near the window, their knitting in their laps, their tongues already busy imparting the latest news. Others, like the sisters Miri and Helve, were busy on the balcony outside. Their laughter drifted in through the open door. They were stretching a shawl across a birch wood frame. They looked up, their cheeks pink, holding the frame between them. The shawl’s lace edges were hooked across the bordered nails like a net designed to catch leaping circus performers. A bucket sat at their feet, filled with warm soapy water. Each shawl we made had to be hand washed gently in rainwater collected in buckets and heated to eliminate any impurities. Once blocked and dried, the yarn would relax into its final shape and any loose stitches were woven back in.
‘Hi! Kati!’ Their voices rang out warmly in greeting.
I raised my hand.
Other women murmured greetings at me before turning back to their neighbours to resume their conversations. Today was not just a day of tying up loose ends. It was also a chance to talk and catch up on the latest news. Since the arrival of the Soviets, our local newspaper Postimees had been full of stories unrelated to the annexation. It was clear that the journalists were being held to ransom; they could not print the truth, so the only way to glean any real knowledge was to listen to local gossip.
Snatches of it trickled through the room.
‘Did you hear about Helju Jänes from Pärnu county? Her husband was arrested last month.’
‘Those poor children!’
‘She took her last roubles to the upravlenie administration office to ask them for help. She was hoping they would exchange them for food.’