by Reevik, Carl
‘I need to talk to her.’
Siim waited for a moment. ‘You know what? Me too.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. I want to see her. It’s Thursday night, I’ll take the day off tomorrow. It’s just three hours by car. You’re on your way here you said?’
‘I’m getting a lift. I’ll be in Brussels in maybe one hour.’
‘Well perfect. They now closed the last street around our building for works, and reopened another one, but only in one direction. It’s a maze. I’ll just meet you at your building, in an hour. I’ll wait for you in the car, it’s still the rusty white one.’
Tienhoven’s secretary had said that the boss wouldn’t be in the office until the next morning anyway, certainly not after having suffered a heart attack. And Hans didn’t feel like sitting around at home now.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘See you then, Siim.’
‘A long weekend by the stormy sea. And I’ll still have all night, if you catch my drift.’
Hans touched the screen. A warning appeared that battery death was imminent. He handed the phone back to Viktor and said, ‘That was someone from Brussels. He’ll meet me at the anti-fraud building. I can tell you how to get there, so far you always came by train, I believe.’
Viktor didn’t reply.
‘Thank you Viktor,’ Hans added. ‘I really appreciate this.’
Brussels
Anatoly Slavkin was a thin young man with a pale face. Not the most imposing character physically, certainly not when he was sitting in a low chair behind a large and empty wooden table with intricate carving. But he knew that there was a reason why he was posted here. He, and not the hundreds of others who had wanted a posting at an embassy in Western Europe. He, and not the thousands of others who had applied for the academy. He was better than the others, and the others were worse. There was nothing heart-breaking about it. Not about the competition, not about his posting. It was life, no-one had promised it would be pleasant for everyone. Or for anyone, in fact. Now he was where he was, and there was a phone ringing. His job included picking up this particular phone, during this particular late afternoon. So he did his job. He lifted the phone, an apparatus with a landline cord, from a chest next to the table and placed it on the heavy wooden table top. Then he hummed, because he knew that it worked better to prepare his voice than clearing his throat. Then he picked up the receiver and said, ‘Da, slushayu vas.’
‘This is Pavel. Here are the numbers.’
Pavel quoted a sequence of numbers, which Slavkin confirmed were correct.
Then Pavel continued. ‘A man wearing glasses will bring another man who’s around thirty to the Commission’s anti-fraud department in about one hour from now. Red Volkswagen Shahran, Luxembourg, CP 4478.’
‘I can walk around and wait there, but the moment I leave the embassy the Belgians or Americans will shadow me.’
‘Yes, you are very important, you moron.’
‘It’s the same in every embassy in Europe these days.’
Slavkin listened quietly for another twenty seconds. Then he put the receiver back down, and recorded the event in his log. The anti-fraud building was in the European quarter, about five kilometres from the embassy. Time to wake up the driver. The man had been around when there had still been pictures of Lenin on the walls. Now the lazy bastard should work a little for his salary.
13
It was almost completely dark outside when Viktor and Hans arrived at the anti-fraud building. Hans saw Siim’s more or less white car waiting on the other side of the street, illuminated by a street lantern.
‘Thanks again,’ Hans said to Viktor. He felt that shaking hands would lead to awkwardness. Viktor didn’t seem to mind. He said nothing.
Hans got out and crossed the street. He waved Siim hello as he approached his car and went around to the passenger’s side. As he got in he saw Viktor’s red family van leave. Hans closed the door with a not entirely healthy sound of metal on metal.
‘Ready to go?’, Siim said as he started the noisy engine. The car coughed and roared as it started moving. There was a metallic clonk near the rear wheel on Hans’s side. Siim listened for a second, then shifted to second gear. The tyres were all right, and the engine’s coughing got better in third gear. The car’s interior was as messy as Hans had remembered it from last time. There was a package of cookies lying on the floor on the passenger’s side. Hans didn’t want to trample them to crumbs, so he took them and put them on the floor in the back.
‘So tell me what happened,’ Siim asked as he steered his car into the lane leading to the motorway that would take them out of Brussels and north towards the Netherlands. ‘Or should we talk women and football first?’
‘Women and football, in that order,’ Hans said. He wasn’t even kidding. He could use a little distraction, and Siim was very good at these things.
‘Come on, there was an explosion and someone died,’ Siim protested. ‘Who was it?’
Siim was right. He was doing Hans a favour here by giving him a lift. Not entirely selflessly, since he was also flying on the wings of love to his not-quite-yet fiancée Clarissa, but it was a favour nonetheless. And Hans needed fresh input.
So Hans said, ‘The man who died was a Commission employee at atomic energy. I don’t know exactly how he died, he was probably killed.’
‘What was the explosion?’
‘His head exploded.’
‘Whoa.’
‘And he may have been a Russian agent.’
‘A Russian spy? In the Commission?’, Siim asked incredulously.
‘What, you think the Commission is so secure that a spy could never infiltrate?’
‘No, it’s just such an improbable target. What were they hoping to steal? The top secret drafts of next month’s fishing quotas? Or the calculation of next year’s milk subsidies? Or my extremely sensitive railway plans, destroy after reading?’
‘One thought I had was that the Russians put him on the reserve list, without knowing where in the Commission he would end up,’ Hans replied. ‘And the place where he did end up is not entirely harmless. They process reports about the use of nuclear material in the member countries. That’s what I used your phone for yesterday morning, to check out which unit was in charge of this.’
Siim changed lanes again to stay on the correct motorway. North via Antwerp, Utrecht, past Amsterdam, and up along the North Sea coast to the northern tip of the landmass.
‘So what would the Russians do with nuclear reports?’, Siim asked.
‘Falsify them. To hide uranium disappearing.’
‘Why?’
‘Indeed, why,’ Hans said. ‘If you were the Russians, what would you do with stolen uranium?’
Siim thought for a few moments as he overtook another car. The third within two minutes. He was a more dynamic driver than Viktor, even though this car probably could use some rest. Or replacement.
Siim said, ‘I guess they have enough uranium of their own, so they’d only use stolen one to make it deniable.’
Hans nodded.
Siim continued, ‘And then they could do some mischief. Drive a wedge between one country and another. Is that why you want to talk to Clarissa? Have they stolen uranium from Petten?’
Hans shrugged. ‘They stole it in four different countries, at least planned uranium use has been cancelled in four, a couple of times. In Holland, yes, but also in Poland for example. Wait.’ He took out Viktor’s Excel sheet about the Netherlands. ‘JRC-PRR, is that it?’
Siim nodded. ‘Joint Research Centre, Petten Research Reactor. That’s where she is.’
‘Shit, I could have asked her right away.’ Hans folded the sheet and put it back in his jacket pocket.
‘Don’t worry,’ Siim said. ‘You’ll see her soon enough.’
Hans exhaled. He had lost time, although it wasn’t clear what exactly he could have used it for earlier.
‘Yes, Clarissa might know more,’ Hans said finally. ‘Plus,
I don’t know enough about what else they could do with stolen uranium. Like threaten their neighbours?’
Now it was Siim who shrugged. ‘They have more than enough tanks to threaten their neighbours. But if it’s supposed to be deniable… Sponsor separatists? Or help them in some way?’
The engine’s roar became worrying as Siim accelerated again to overtake two more cars in one go.
‘Separatists. In the old Soviet republics,’ Hans said, thinking aloud.
‘They aren’t necessarily separatists until they’re activated,’ Siim said. ‘They are Russian-speakers who’ve more or less always lived there. You know how it works. There is a movement demanding a separate province, or a separate country for the Russian-speaking population. For many Russians the breakup of the Soviet Union feels like an extended practical joke, they are sort of waiting for things to go back to normal. And so once the militias or whatever have their province, they’ll plead Moscow to please attach them to Russia proper. Russia doesn’t send any tanks. At least no tanks with the Russian flag on it. At least not in the beginning. In the beginning it’s all mysterious local volunteer activists with surprisingly modern weaponry.’
Hans knew what Siim was talking about, of course. But he was also thinking of potentially new theatres of conflict.
‘You’re thinking about Estonia,’ Siim said. ‘We’re a bit different, I think. I hope.’
Another noisy acceleration. He was really pushing it to the extreme.
‘How exactly are we different?’, Hans wondered. ‘A quarter of our population defines itself as Russian-speaking. Many of them are feeling like a minority trapped in a foreign country through no fault of their own. Like you said, a practical joke.’
‘Narva on the border, you think that’s our Crimea? The chunk Moscow will want to have?’
‘It’s the whole NorthEast.’
‘Well, we are inside NATO already. And that’s the big difference. They now even have a proper contingency plan in case we’re invaded. All our training in the army may pay off after all.’
Hans thought back to the hiking in the woods. Estonian military doctrine was basically to deter casual incursions, and otherwise to hold out and buy time until allies arrived, if there were any. Hence all the hiking and the camping and the minelaying and grenade-lobbing in forests and swamps. Slow the Russians down, ambush them, disrupt their communication lines.
The Russians. A strange word. Normally this meant the Russian leadership, or authorities, or their army, not the sum of all individual Russian people. Like the British meant the government, or a particular British agency, not every single Briton. But where lay the distinction?
Hans thought about his grandmother, the Russian one. An exceptionally kind woman. Thanks to her he still spoke the language a little. Not much, but at least he didn’t make the typical Estonian’s mistakes. A Russian noun could be either a he, a she, or an it. In Estonian nouns didn’t have any gender, so Estonians were known for picking just any random gender when speaking Russian. There were plenty of jokes about Estonian men using the feminine form when talking about themselves, which to Russian ears made them sound like transvestites. Hans spoke correctly in that respect. In addition, when they were old enough, his grandmother had taught Hans and his older brothers Russians swearwords, and the proper way of pronouncing them so that they sounded convincing.
But that had come later. When they’d been smaller she had read stories to him and Lennart. And Margus before them, but he had been too old for stories at some point. Anyway, there’d been lots of stories, lasting for hours. Hans and Lennart had been read to together, Hans remembered. Their grandmother had covered the Soviet children’s classics, of course. About the talking crocodile in the city. About the doctor who flew on the back of an eagle to heal the monkeys of their belly ache, and who then hijacked a pirate ship. Or about the generous fly who was almost eaten by a spider and then married a brave mosquito.
And there’d been the Russian fairy tales, full of recurring magical characters in ever-changing combinations. His favourite had been about Prince Ivan on his horse at the crossroads, reading the inscription on the stone: he who goes straight ahead will be cold and hungry; he who goes to the right will be alive and well but his horse will be dead; he who goes to the left will die himself but his horse will live. Hans had loved it.
‘Have you met someone new in Brussels yet?’, Siim asked. He probably now thought that Hans could use a little distraction, so the topic should change from geopolitics to women. But now Hans didn’t want to be distracted anymore. He wasn’t done thinking yet.
The same kind grandmother would become very outspoken when it came to geopolitics, certainly after the end of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union. That was also when Hans was becoming old enough to follow such adult conversations at the kitchen table. People in the West are only watching the news from the West, she would say. They should see it from Russia’s perspective, for once. The country is huge, but it’s mostly Siberia, where no-one lives. The cities are crowded on the edges. Just look at Leningrad. She would never stop calling it Leningrad, even after they had changed it back to Saint Petersburg. The Finnish border is just outside the city limits, she would say. Just outside our second city, imagine. She had lived most of her life in Estonia, and the country had been independent again for a few years already. But to her the second city was not Tartu right after Tallinn. It was Leningrad right after Moscow.
The Finnish border used to be even closer, good thing we pushed it back a little, she believed. That pushing back a little was basically a land grab by Stalin, their father had once objected. A bloody carnage at minus thirty degrees or worse. The Finns suffered and paid dearly, while the corpses of Russian soldiers kept piling up in the snow at alarmingly high rates. They couldn’t dig the usual ditches to throw them all in, because the soil had frozen solid. And the death rates weren’t even all that alarming to the Soviets, he had added, because they didn’t care about conditions for their own troops. That’s why they had started the war in the middle of the bloody winter, it was sheer callousness and indifference.
It was the only time Hans remembered his father discussing politics with his mother-in-law. One of the very few times he had seen him agitated, in fact. The rebuttal had followed swiftly, in the form of a sharp reminder of the siege of Leningrad. When Hitler invaded, the Finns used the opportunity to get their strip of land back. They advanced to their old border, which they had been forced to leave a year earlier, but this then cut off Leningrad from the north during the German siege. Hans’s grandmother’s older sisters had starved to death inside the city. When the tide of the war turned, the Soviets pushed the Finns back again to their previous and now current border line. Hitler killed one person in every Russian family, she had said. One or more. Or in fact the whole family. Having enough land between yourself and your neighbours is not a matter of prestige, it is a question of life and death. To her sisters the lack of it had meant death.
Siim was still waiting for an answer. ‘You know where I’ve been all day,’ Hans said, in reply to his question. ‘In Luxembourg, and I didn’t hang around in bars to chat up women.’
It was again, still, always the geopolitics. Look at the map. All we have are land borders, she had said to Hans and Lennart once. There are no proper seas. And where there are seas, we have no proper navy ports. They either freeze in winter, or they are right next to someone else’s border. It’s easy for the Americans to lecture us. They have a big army, lots of money, an ocean to the left and an ocean to the right. Just imagine if right behind Los Angeles came not the ocean but the Chinese border. Who would lecture whom then? The Americans should swap places with the Russians and live here for a century or just a decade, she had said. And then we would sit in Florida and lecture them about how they should deal with their neighbours. What would they say then? Obviously they would tell us to shut up and go to the sauna. ‘Go to the sauna’ was a child-friendly version of a much stronger Russian
expression. His grandmother never swore in ordinary speech.
‘Forget bars,’ Siim insisted. ‘Think translators. A lot of our translators work in Luxembourg. They are just typing stuff all day, and it doesn’t matter where exactly they do that. So they put them in Luxembourg. Many highly qualified young women, I understand. They pass the translators’ job competition and wait for some other vacancy to open up.’
Hans didn’t listen to Siim anymore. In the same conversation, in the same breath her grandmother could show her deep sympathy, her despair at the misfortune or plain suffering of her fellow Russians. The poor pensioners during the nineties, the murdered journalists in the decade that followed; the corrupt officials, the national wealth that got stolen. The government’s carelessness with individuals’ dignity, property and lives. The passionately patriotic bellicosity came only when it came to geopolitics and history. It was completely detached from the fact that she had been happily married to an Estonian all her life, and that she felt at home in Estonia, probably more so than she would have felt in Russia itself.
‘Anyway, you should go out with a lady from Denmark,’ Siim continued. ‘Some of them are freakishly tall, their legs go right up to your chin. Which is perfect, if you know what I mean. Whatever happened to Clarissa’s flatmate?’
At some point Hans had concluded that discussing geostrategic situations at the kitchen table was basically the most popular Russian national sport, much more so than ice hockey. Not their main preoccupation, but certainly part of the mindset. He had read somewhere that when an American said ‘that’s history’, it meant that it wasn’t important. In Eastern Europe the opposite was true. Maybe that’s why Estonia kept trying to rebrand itself as Northern Europe, instead of Eastern Europe.
‘We need to fuel up before crossing into Holland,’ Siim said. ‘And this warning light’s on again, the car needs oil. And I’ll buy us a bottle of wine. Or better two.’
Prince Ivan chose the path to the right. He survived, as the inscription on the stone had promised. His horse got torn to pieces. Lots of adventures ensued. He returned to his home town a hero.