The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [70]
“May I call you Sigita?” asked Julija, twisting the coffee cup nervously in her hands. “I still think of you like that, even though you are a grown woman now.”
“Yes,” said Sigita. She had seated herself in the armchair, or rather, on the edge of it. Her right hand was clenched so hard that the nails bit into her palm, but she knew somehow that trying to rush the woman on the couch would be a bad idea. She suddenly remembered Grandfather’s carrier pigeons. How they sometimes landed on the roof of the coop and wouldn’t come all the way in, so that their recorded flight time would be minutes slower than it might have been.
“No use trying to hurry things,” her grandfather would say. “Sit on the bench beside me, Sigita, they’ll come when they come.”
Grandfather had died in 1991, in the year of the Independence. Granny Julija didn’t care about the races. She sold the best pigeons to a neighbor and left the rest to their own devices until the roof blew off the coop during a winter storm five or six years later.
Sigita looked at Julija and forced herself to sit quietly, waiting.
“You mustn’t tell the police,” said Julija in the end. “Do you promise?”
Sigita promised. It still didn’t seem to be enough.
“He was so angry because we had called them. He said he had had to hurt Zita because we told, and that it was all our fault.” The hand that held the cup was trembling.
“I won’t say anything,” said Sigita.
“Promise.”
“Yes. I promise.”
Julija stared at her unremittingly. Then she suddenly put the coffee cup down. She raised her hands to the back of her neck and bent her head so that she could take off a necklace she was wearing. No. Not just a necklace. It was a crucifix, thought Sigita. A small golden Jesus on a black wooden cross; despite the miniscule size, the pain in the tiny face was evident.
“Do you believe in God?” asked Julija.
“Yes,” said Sigita, because this was not the time to mince the nuances of faith and doubt.
“Then swear on this. Touch it. And promise that you won’t go to the police with anything I tell you.”
Sigita carefully put her hand on the crucifix and repeated her promise. She wasn’t sure that this meant more to her than the assurances she had already given, but it seemed to ease Julija’s mind.
“He gave us an envelope. So that we could see what we had made him do, he said. Inside was one of her nails. An entire nail. I knew it was hers, because I had let her play with my nail polish the day before.” Julija’s voice shook. “He said that if we went to the police later on, he would take Zita again, and this time he would sell her to some men he knew. Men of the kind who enjoy having sex with little girls, he said.”
Sigita swallowed.
“But Julija,” she said. “If he is in prison, he can’t take Zita.”
Julija shook her head wildly.
“Do you think I can risk that? People don’t stay in jail forever. And besides, I know for a fact that he is not alone.”
Sigita thought it a miracle that Julija had come at all.
“I didn’t know he would do that,” whispered Julija, almost as if she could hear Sigita’s unspoken words. “I didn’t know he would take your child.”
“But you got Zita back,” said Sigita. “How did you do that?”
Julija was silent for so long that Sigita grew afraid she wouldn’t answer.
“I gave him you,” she whispered, in the end. “He wanted to know your name, and I told him.”
Sigita stared at Julija in utter bafflement.
“He wanted to know my name … ?”
“Yes. You see, we never register the girls. At the clinic, I mean. Their names aren’t recorded anywhere, because the parents—that is, the new parents—all get a birth certificate that makes it appear that the child is their own.”
A deep pain burned somewhere in Sigita’s abdomen. I was right, she thought blindly. This is God’s punishment. This is all my fault because I sold my firstborn child. There was a kind of black logic to it that had nothing to do with reason and the light of day.
“But why … what did he want with me?”
Julija shook her head. “It’s not really him. He is just the one who actually does things. It has to be the other one. The Dane.