Laughter erupted from the women nearby. Helle’s smile widened. Boys were taught to knit, too, from a young age although they usually gave it up when they were old enough to help with the heavier chores. During the long winters, when snow and darkness made it impossible to go outside, whole families would sometimes work together, carding sheep’s wool between paddles to rid it of burrs and then refining it on the spinning wheel, making sure the baskets were always full of yarn.
Helle began to place her folded shawls back in the basket.
‘Wait a moment,’ Leili said. She turned to me, unsmiling. ‘You haven’t tested them properly. With the ring.’
Helle’s lips compressed and she turned around, scowling. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The wedding ring,’ Leili repeated, drawing out each word slowly as if Helle were hard of hearing. ‘The test.’
The women around us muttered. I saw the flash of teeth as they grinned, excited by the prospect of a little conflict. There had always been competition between Leili and Helle. Rumour said it went back to the time when they were girls and Helle’s future husband, then a youth, had swum naked with Leili in Lake Peipus.
‘Kati isn’t married.’ Helle cast Leili a look sour enough to wither grapes. ‘So, she doesn’t have a ring. Besides, she has already given her approval.’
‘Here.’ My cousin Etti came to stand beside me. Reaching into the pocket of her skirt, she drew out her wedding band and pressed it into my hand.
I tried to hand it back. ‘This is unnecessary.’
Some of the women’s eager faces fell.
‘No, Kati,’ Helle insisted. ‘If Leili thinks we should do the test, then we must. I’ve nothing to fear.’
She handed me the topmost shawl on the pile. The women in the knitting circle leaned forward eagerly to watch as I held Etti’s ring between my fingers and poked the end of Helle’s shawl through. As I pulled the remainder of the lace through, I heard my grandmother’s voice. Each shawl must be fine enough to be drawn through a wedding ring. Just as smoke from a chimney is a sure sign that a woman is knitting inside, so is the ring test a way for us to know a shawl’s quality.
When the shawl pulled clear through, some of the younger women clapped. The mood in the room lifted. Laughter and conversation began to flow as they flocked back to their seats, the older ones relating stories of the other times they had seen the trick performed.
‘There, you see?’ Helle’s eyes were bright. She turned her back pointedly on Leili, who unfolded her arms and hobbled back to her chair. Helle handed me the basket and I took it to the bureau that held the completed shawls awaiting market day.
One or two other women brought forward their shawls for my inspection and then added them to the growing pile in the bureau. Aunt Juudit emerged with a tray from the kitchenette, where she had been heating up water brewed with nettles and strips of birch. Some of the young women wrinkled up their noses at the broth, but others, Helle and Leili included, took up their chipped mugs and muttered a small blessing, grateful for the warm drink that they swore eased their knotted joints and aching bones.
Aunt Juudit restarted the gramophone and led the younger women in another rousing rendition of ‘L’Internationale’ while behind her back, my cousin Etti paused in her knitting to throw me an exasperated look.
With the women occupied, I found a moment to pull out my own yarn and knitting needles. This shawl will be my last, I thought, and the knowledge was bittersweet. What pattern would I make? I sat in quiet reflection a moment before taking up the needles for the veniv kootud serv: stretchy knitted cast-on. I would make a wolf’s paw shawl. It seemed fitting that my grandmother’s pattern would be the last I made before I was forced to stop. The pleasant rhythm of the knitting soon took over. I felt my body slowly relax, the tension leaving my arms and legs.
‘Kati!’ I turned to find Viktoria standing beside me. A wisp of a girl with bad skin and teeth, she smiled at me from beneath a curtain of hair that fell in mousy ringlets down to her waist.
I stood, giving her my brightest smile. ‘How are you, Vikki?’
‘Good.’ Viktoria was twisting a shawl in her hands. ‘Look, I finished the pasqueflower! It was hard; you were right, about needing to keep just the right amount of tension in the yarn. I had to unpick a few rows, but it’s finished now.’
As I took it from her the lace was warm from her hands. I unfolded it carefully, noting the delicate openwork leaves with twisted stems, the double strand of yarn Vikki had used to strengthen the finer parts. I could feel her watching me anxiously. The bottom edges had been worked carefully so that they draped and did not curl. It was the sort of shawl my grandmother would have praised; although it was not embellished with nupps, the foundations of the shawl were secure, the stitches evenly spaced.
‘Viktoria,’ I said, my heart lifting with pride. ‘This is beautiful work!’ I turned the shawl in my hands, marvelling at how far Viktoria had come since she first joined our knitting circle last year. If anyone had told me then that it was she who had crafted this fine shawl, I would have shaken my head in disbelief. Viktoria had been living upstairs with her father until the night of the Soviets’ arrival. He had been beaten to death after rushing out to protest as the Russian military moved through the streets, rounding up members of political parties and local policemen who would not comply. It was said that half a million troops moved across the Baltics during the first days of the Soviet occupation, their number far outweighing the armies of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Only some people had dared to resist and those who chose to fight, like the Estonian Independent Signal Battalion in Tallinn, soon found themselves surrounded, forced to negotiate and surrender before they too were killed.
A week after the annexation, the same day the Nazis occupied France, Aunt Juudit had found Viktoria wandering dazed in the courtyard outside the apartment block, her hands raw and bleeding. Through her tears, she’d explained how she had gone to search for her father and found a group of soldiers kicking his lifeless body. When she cried out, they chased her. She’d taken refuge in the cellar of a shop which had been looted and set on fire, too scared to return home, too afraid to go back and find her father’s body to arrange a burial. When she at last found her way back to the apartment block, Aunt Juudit had organised for her to stay with Helle in the apartment down the hall, and encouraged her to join us, in the hope that the knitting would keep her mind away from the horrors she had witnessed. Even so it had taken at least two months before Viktoria’s hands were steady enough to hold the needles properly and another three months of practising by copying my grandmother’s lace samplers before she was ready to knit her first shawl.
The Viktoria standing before me was different to the one I remembered from her first knitting circle, that shy ghost of a girl who refused to speak, and winced when I first handed her the needles. This Viktoria stood more confidently, her shoulders pushed back. Her hair shone like copper and even her skin was less red than usual, which probably had something to do with the bars of pine tar soap Helle cooked up in her apartment kitchenette.