A figure was bent over my chest, rifling through the contents.
‘Agnese!’ The name burst from my lips.
She spun around, her mouth open. In her hand was my mother’s letter. Kati ran across and snatched it from her. Agnese tried to grab it back, but Kati held it away from her.
‘You’re a liar!’ Agnese pointed at me. Her voice was choked with emotion. She turned to fling her words at Kati. ‘She’s a spy! I know her. I know who she is!’
She was breathing hard. An explosion shook the building.
‘Is that a message? A secret code?’ She pointed at Mama’s letter. I stared at her, unable to speak, unable even to defend myself. Horror mingled with relief. She had not yet read the letter. She’d not had time.
I shook my head, terror muting my words.
‘I was listening at the train station, the night of the deportations.’ Agnese’s voice shook. ‘I followed him, that lieutenant of yours. I went to beg him for help. For my daughter, her husband. My grandson was sick. I heard what he called you.’ She glared at Kati again. ‘She’s the Partorg’s daughter. I know it. She could have stopped it. She could have stopped my daughter being sent away! My grandson might still be alive.’
My heart pounded so hard I thought it would burst. In an instant, I knew where I’d seen her. I was back at that station in Tartu, talking with Lieutenant Lubov before Juudit was killed. A woman stood near my elbow, trying to catch Lieutenant Lubov’s attention. A green handkerchief was tied over her head. Her eyes were full of grief and despair.
A black space widened at my feet. My skin flared hot.
‘You’re mistaken.’ Kati’s voice carried over the noise of the planes. Her hands were trembling. ‘Lydia was not at the station that night. She was at our apartment. I’m sorry for what happened to your family but… you’re mistaken. Lydia is one of us. She’s as Estonian as you and me.’
Agnese continued to stare at us with fierce eyes until suddenly her face deflated. Tears tracked down her withered cheeks. She knotted her hands about her face like claws and rocked as the Russian planes swooped outside. Her shoulders shook. She did not even seem to notice as Kati seized her shoulder and dragged us both towards the corridor.
We stumbled from the room as a wave of fire seemed to set the night alight.
‘Oh, thank God!’ Etti surged to her feet and threw her arms around us as we staggered down into the cellar. Agnese, still sniffling, shrugged Kati’s hand away and lurched past us, avoiding my eye.
Frau Burkhard’s lamp cast its light across the weaving machines and the looms and the giant cylinders of cloth. ‘Close the doors,’ she said to her husband. General Burkhard was wrapped up in a thick dressing gown. He did not look afraid but wild and dishevelled, as if the air raid was an inconvenience of the highest order. But he did his wife’s bidding, slamming the doors closed and bolting them.
Leaving the lamp on a shelf nearby, the Burkhards shuffled to the back of the cellar, as far as possible from the whimpering children and the women who had seated themselves on the cold floor. Above us, a muffled vibration shook the ground, sifting dirt down from the ceiling, scattering in the folds of my nightgown. I hugged Etti to me.
Perhaps we will die down here, I thought. Buried among the stone and plaster. I would never see Russia again, or Jakob. I would never see his face, or run my fingers across his skin. I will never get to tell him that I am carrying his child.
This thought pained me most of all.
Pulling us into a little alcove between two broken looms, Etti made us sit beside her while she held Leelo, trying to soothe the little girl’s cries. She listened gravely as we told her what had happened with Agnese upstairs. My body was still shaking. I hugged my knees to my chest and my breasts prickled at the sudden contact.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t think we can wait for Oskar and Jakob any longer,’ Etti said. She was soothing the sobbing Leelo, who refused to lie down and instead flailed her arms and kicked her long legs, protesting the disruption of sleep. Leelo’s pretty face was red, her eyes swollen. Half a tooth had broken through the skin at the bottom of her mouth. It was visible when she cried.
Etti tugged her against her body, trying to calm her. ‘We’ve waited long enough.’ Her eyes glimmered. ‘We have Oskar’s contact’s name and his address. I think we should leave tomorrow. It’s possible Agnese will believe you, Kati. But it is also possible she might report Lydia. Even without proof, they might listen to her claims and start an investigation.’
Kati opened her mouth as if she would argue. Then she closed it. Her shoulders sagged. She looked at me; a long look in which I read all the pain we shared and the question she could not bring herself to ask. Etti was right. We could not wait any longer.
I swallowed, thinking of Jakob’s square jaw and his snub nose, as if someone had pressed their thumb against it as he slept. How could I leave him behind, as I had left Joachim to his fate? And then I remembered the dream, his child sleeping, curled in an eggshell. I had to protect us both.
‘Tomorrow,’ I agreed, turning away from the light of the oil lamp to shield the misery in my face, the rush of helpless despair. A hand touched my arm.
‘Lida?’ Wiping my nose with my sleeve, I looked back to find Kati was holding something out to me. It was my mother’s letter. I reached for it, just as Kati looked down. Her face changed. When I tried to take the letter from her, she held it fast.
‘Whose letter is that?’ she said.
I felt my cheeks colouring. I looked around, still wary of Agnese. But the woman was sitting at the far end of the cellar, legs drawn up, face in her hands.
‘My mother’s,’ I whispered. ‘She had a friend – they wrote to each other. I told you.’
‘I recognise that writing.’ Kati brought the letter up to her face, tilting it so that the light fell across the words. ‘That is my grandmother’s handwriting. Elina Rebane.’
We stared at each other, mystified.
‘Your grandmother taught my mother to knit.’ I felt the truth of this as if it was something I had always known, something which had lain hidden in plain sight. My connection to Kati, and to Jakob, too, had started years before we were born.
Kati and I had been lace sisters all along.
Lilac Pattern
Kati
It was snowing as we passed through the iron gates of Kreenholm and crossed over the bridge connecting the island to the Estonian mainland. The water flowed sluggishly between the river’s banks, its currents blocked by a thin crust of ice encroaching steadily across the surface. There was only one road into town. Huddling together, we moved along it, passing bare trees and abandoned houses.
I tried to focus on the road, slippery with ice, but couldn’t resist stealing curious glances at the old-fashioned terraces with their fine red bricks, dormer windows and gabled eaves dusted with snow. I remembered Frau Burkhard telling us that the houses had once belonged to the English managers placed in charge of Kreenholm during its glory days. They had all fled, of course, when the Russians arrived.
I felt my bones creak, complaining of the cold that bit and snarled in the air. The knapsack weighed down my back though it contained just one change of clothes and my knitting things. We had left everything we had been given – the trunks, the aprons and caps – behind. The factory had not been too badly damaged during the bombing raid as the planes had been targeting the supply depots on the outskirts of town. The Burkhards had not been happy to see us go. Frau Burkhard had shouted and accused us of being ungrateful, but there was nothing they could do to keep us there. We had told them we planned to return to our family in Tartu. If they did bother to report us one day, we would be long gone, I hoped, already in Sweden… and waiting for Oskar and Jakob to join us there.