Purge by Sofi Oksanen Read Free Book Online Page B

started to churn, and it sank to her legs, which started to tremble, and from her legs it sank into her feet, which started to tingle, and she felt hot, and Grandmother smiled. That smile became their first game, which sprouted word by word and started to blossom mistily, yellowish, the way dead languages blossom, rustling sweetly like the needle of a gramophone, playing like voices underwater. Quiet, whispering, they grew their own language. It was their shared secret, their game. As her mother did housework, her grandmother would sit in her usual chair, and Zara would take out toys and other things or just touch an object, and Grandmother would form its name in Estonian, silently, with her lips. If the word was wrong, Zara was supposed to notice it. If she didn’t know the word, she wouldn’t get any candy, but if she caught the mistake, she always got a mouthful of sweets. Her mother didn’t like it that Grandmother gave her candy for no reason—or so she thought—but she didn’t bother to intervene beyond a disapproving sniff. Zara could keep the delicious words, the sweet tongue, and those rare stories that Grandmother told about a café somewhere there, a café where they served rhubarb crumble with thick whipped cream, a café whose chocolate cream puffs would melt in your mouth and whose garden smelled of jasmine, and the rustle of German newspapers—but not just German; Estonian and Russian ones, too—and tie pins and cuff links, and women in fine hats, you could even see dandies in dark suits and tennis shoes, with clouds of magnesium blowing out of a house where they had just taken a photograph. The promenade along the shore at the Sunday concert. A sip of seltzer in the park. The Koluvere princess who haunted the streets at night. The raspberry jam on french bread in the warmth of the stove on a winter night, with cold milk to drink! And red currant nectar!

    Zara packed her suitcase again, piled everything on top of the hotel brochure and stockings, closed the case, and put it back in its place in the wardrobe. Grandmother had turned back to the window to stare at the sky. You couldn’t put a blanket over the window in the winter, even though there was a draft, though they tried to seal up everything as well as they could. Grandmother had to be able to see the sky—even at night, when there was nothing to see. She said that it was the same sky they had at home. And the Big Dipper was important to her, because it was the same Big Dipper they had at home, it was just a little fainter—sometimes you really had to search for it. It was always easy to get Grandmother to smile with the Big Dipper—Zara just had to point to it and say its name. As a child, Zara hadn’t understood why. It wasn’t until later that she realized that Grandmother was talking about Estonia. She was born there, just like Zara’s mother was. Then the war came, and the famine, and the war had taken Grandfather, and they had to escape the Germans. They had come to Vladivostok, and there was work here, and more food, too, so they had stayed.

    “Would it be wrong to go to Germany to work?” Zara asked her grandmother.

    Grandmother didn’t turn her head. “You’ll have to ask your mother.”

    “But she won’t say anything. She never says anything. If she wants me to go, she won’t say anything, and if she doesn’t want me to go, she won’t say anything.”

    “Your mother’s a woman of few words.”

    “Of no words, you mean.”

    “Now,” Grandmother said reproachfully.

    “I don’t think she cares whether I’m here or somewhere else.”

    “That’s not true.”

    “Don’t defend her!”

    Zara slurped her tea angrily. The tea went down the wrong pipe, and she started coughing until her eyes watered. She would leave. At least she would be away from the shuffling of her mother’s slippers. Other people’s mothers had been in the bombing when they were children, and they still talked, even though Grandmother