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In this third in the series, Nina Borg, a Danish Red Cross nurse, is heading perilously close to the bottom. Still recovering from the accidental radiation exposure she experienced in INVISIBLE MURDER, she is living on her own in a small apartment, her husband having lost all patience with the risks she is willing to take on behalf of her protegés, especially when she exposes her children to danger. She is still working at Coal-House Camp, a holding centre for refugees who are awaiting the disposition of their claims for asylum. Natasha, a young Ukrainian mail-order and mother of Rina, an eight-year old who suffers from serious asthma, is suspected of having killed her abusive partner. A resourceful young woman, Natasha manages to escape custody and disappears, reluctantly leaving her child behind. Nina, feeling empty nest-ish as her own kids are now living with their father, involves herself fully in Rina's care. She is, it goes without saying, open to helping Natasha evade capture, should the occasion arise.
The contemporary story alternates with a rivetting account of life in Ukraine in the 1930s, first during the famine and the campaign against the kulaks, a bit later during what was to develop into Stalin's Great Terror got underway. Two little girls are at the centre of this story, one eight, the other ten. What they did as children and what was done to them is still reverberating seventy years on.
A confession: I have never much liked Nina Borg as a character. Although her sympathies are quickly engaged by those suffering misfortune, she has often seemed to me to need the objects of her charity to be simple victims, whom only she is able to aid and love. Perhaps because of the inevitable awkwardness of translation, I have never been altogether certain that the authors share my view.
But with this third installment, what they are up to with the character becomes much clearer. With each installment in the series, Nina loses just a little more. At the end of the first book, she had to promise her husband that she would no longer take on assignments in foreign and dangerous places. As INVISIBLE MURDER concludes, both her daughter and her husband withdraw from her in disgust at her inability to put either of them first in her life. And now, even the woman she saw as a victim needing salvation has disappeared without turning once to Nina for help. Nina must face up to the fact that she "can't keep defining myself as the one who has to save everyone else." Whether she can resist the impulse, whether the damage she has unwillingly caused can be repaired is the subject for another book, and I hope Kaaberbøl and Friis are hard at work on it right now.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, October 2013
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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