Purge by Sofi Oksanen

cup, moved her lips in time with the news, looking past the girl as she searched Aliide’s face for a sign of what the thud could have meant. Aliide kept her expression steady. Hopefully the boys would leave it at that one rock for tonight.

    The girl couldn’t stay focused on anything else, not when she was imagining her husband lurking in the yard, stalking her. She had to be alert like that, keep her eyes and ears open at all times. Aliide put down her coffee cup and placed her fingers on either side of it. She fell to examining the soil-darkened cracks in her hands, much deeper than the old knife cuts that striped the oilcloth, made more visible by the bread crumbs and salt that had spilled on the table.

    “What’s that noise?”

    “I didn’t hear anything.”

    The girl didn’t pay any attention to Aliide’s answer.

    Instead she tiptoed up to the window. She had pulled the scarf down onto her neck so that she could hear better. Her back was stiff and her shoulders raised.

    Aliide’s cup had no handle, just a rough stump where the handle had been. She started to tap on it with her thumb. The threads of soil in her cracked skin bounced against the porcelain. Those boys sure knew how to choose their timing. On the other hand, the girl surely couldn’t be thinking that it was anyone but her own businessman, or whatever you want to call him, up to something out there. Aliide became annoyed again. The Russians liked their fine clothes and handsome hotels, but when it came time to pay, they started bellyaching. Everybody has a price. Protection isn’t cheap. She felt the urge again to give the girl a good swat. If you’re going to tremble, tremble in private, where no one will see you.

    “There are a lot of animals around here. Wild boars. If you leave the gate open, they even come right into the yard.”

    The girl turned to look at Aliide with disbelief. “But I told you about my husband!”

    Another rock hit the window. A little shower of rocks.

    The girl opened the kitchen door and crept to the foyer to listen. Just as she put her ear to the chink in the outer door, something hit it so that it shook. She jumped backward and went back into the kitchen.

    The girl ought to focus on something else. When she was younger, Aliide always had a bag of tricks for one situation or another, but now her mind refused to come up with anything better than wild boars.

    She washed her hands thoroughly and started to change the milk in the kefir, tried to act natural, picked up the can from the floor, opened the lid, strained the liquid into a cup, and rinsed off the culture, trying again with wild boars, stray dogs and cats, although even she thought her explanations sounded stupid. The girl paid no attention; she just whispered that she had to leave now, her husband had found what belonged to him, lured his prey into his trap. Aliide could see how she curled up in a ball like an old dog, the corners of her mouth stiffened, the little hairs laid flat against her skin, crossing her right foot over her left as if she were cold. Aliide quietly poured more milk over the culture and offered a glass of kefir to the girl.

    “Drink it, it’ll do you good.”

    She stared at the glass without taking it. A fly was crawling on its rim. The corner of her eye twitched, and the movement of her ears, sticking out toward the window, could be easily distinguished against her hairless head.

    “I have to go,” she breathed. “So they won’t do anything bad to you.”

    Aliide lifted the glass to her lips slowly and took a long drink of it, tried to drink the whole glassful but couldn’t. Her throat wasn’t working. She put the glass down on the table. A spider crawled under the table and disappeared between the floorboards. Aliide was fairly certain that the girl was wrong, but how could she explain that the boys from the village were there to make a ruckus in her yard. She would want to know why and how and when and who knows