The Death of the Perfect Sentence

by Rein Raud

  Karl had been informed about the location that morning, on a card pushed through his letterbox. It depicted Kreshchatyk Street in central Kiev, not St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, nor the Hermitage in Leningrad. That meant that he had to stuff the envelope into a certain tree hollow in Pasatski park. Karl hadn’t previously had to deliver anything in the daytime and in such a busy area, and his heart was pounding, but if that was the instruction, there must be a good reason for it. His heart pounding, he glanced around and put his briefcase down. A couple of benches ahead, a man with the typical purple nose was gripping a bottle of beer, but he seemed to be sufficiently occupied with his own personal problems. Karl removed the envelope from his briefcase and took a couple of steps on to the grass, in the direction of the right tree.

  What happened next was like in a film. Probably. He didn’t watch those kinds of films himself, because the role of the good guy was always given to the upstanding Soviet intelligence officers, whom he could not stand. Maybe what happened next was actually the reverse of those films, but that wasn’t important. Two men dressed in identical illfitting suits appeared in the park as if from nowhere. Karl watched them like a rabbit hypnotised into submission by a cobra: he couldn’t even move his arms, to say nothing of trying to run away. He watched with a frozen gaze, as if observing the scene from one remove, as the envelope was yanked from his hand, his arms were twisted behind his back, and he was marched back the way he’d come, towards the park entrance. But then he recalled that a few moments earlier his temporal lobe had registered the screech of brakes. An unmarked black Volga with two men in it, one driving and one in the front passenger seat, had driven on to the footpath. Just as he realised what was happening. He was bundled into the back of the car, and one of the men who had been following him got in, coming crashing down beside him.

  The other man came to a standstill next to the car, opened the envelope, looked at the photos of the brutish soldiers beating the Georgian women with spades and shook his head.

  “Fucking degenerates,” he mumbled to himself. It went without saying that the rest of the world should never be allowed to see photographs like this.

  He took his walkie-talkie out from inside his coat, stepped off the path and under the trees.

  “All taken care of,” he reported. “I’ll stay here on guard.”

  A word about telephones.

  I’m not sure where to start, or how to write about this without making it seem trivial. It’s a question of feelings (most things are a question of feelings, let’s not pretend otherwise). I was probably still in the last year of kindergarten when a telephone first appeared in our house – or maybe I’d already started the first year of school. Our telephone number was 442-75. Our first telephone was pretty ugly, and it was probably issued to us with the number, but soon it was replaced by a really cool red one which was to sit on father’s big writing desk. At that time we lived in two rooms of a communal flat, together with two other families. Me and my brother Mihkel shared one room, and my parents were in the other one, where father also worked. The flat was in an old and soundly built pre-war building, with high ceilings and a spacious corridor. There was also a Pescadas toilet dating from the first Estonian Republic in the bathroom. I remember that there were also neatly cut squares of newspaper on the nail meant for toilet paper, and at one point there were Soviet state loan bonds there too, given to Soviet workers in the 1950s as part of their salary. By the time I started using that toilet the workers had long lost all hope of being able to cash in those bonds.

  The red phone is my brother Mihkel’s most enduring memory of that flat, but possibly he was as a child in awe of that intermittently clanging object, and our parents later told him that it was his main memory from the time. Who knows? Human memory is a wondrous thing.

  Not that my brother and I had much need for a telephone when we lived in that apartment. It was in our new home on Harju Street, where we moved after my sister was born, that I soon developed an out-and-out addiction to it. I would sometimes talk to friends for hours on end. We didn’t play battleships – at least not very often – but we talked at length about anything we could think of. In those days we didn’t have to pay for phone calls, and I constantly kept the line engaged, which really annoyed our parents.

  Two smells

  I have said this before, and I will say it again: two smells are lost from my life, one of them was a good one, one of them bad, but both were my companions for a long time. How could I have forgotten them? When I woke, especially on Sunday mornings, they came to greet me through the open window: burning briquettes and freshly baked pastries. Our home had municipal heating, whereas black smoke billowed from the chimneys in the old town, dissolved into the air and mingled with the smell of pastries coming from the shops on Karja Street and the Pearl and Tallinn cafés. Within moments of waking I’d pulled on my trousers and shirt, done up my laces and was out the door! The pastries were still warm when they reached our breakfast table, and there was rarely anything left over: folded puff pastries and feather-light curd cheese pockets, but best of all, those Vienna pastries topped with yellow confectioner’s cream, which the Communist Party and government had decreed should be called Moscow pastries, even if no one had ever heard of them in Moscow. Sometimes they arrived straight out of the oven, left to cool on the back table of the shop just long enough to be put in the bag. Meanwhile, deposits of briquette smoke built up on our windowpanes, and most probably in our lungs too – there is probably some left even now. Both of those smells disappeared at almost exactly the same time. The briquette smoke wafted away with the people who moved from the old town to the new city districts, making way for better-off occupants. New pipes, new cabling, and new heating were installed in those grimy old houses. And the pastry shops closed their doors for the last time, because those pastries were replaced with a product which always tasted exactly the same, made by people somewhere far away, whose names and faces we did not know.

  When I was at university I used to go to a public telephone centre to call home, and I had to book a call in advance and wait for the line to become available. Sometimes that could take a whole hour. Later, public phones appeared and you could slide your fifteen-kopeck coins into the slot and make the call yourself, but that didn’t speed things up much. After taking a while to dial the number, you would usually end up hearing the slow engaged tone coming from the handset at the end of its twisting metallic cord. But at least you felt you were in control; you dialled the number with your own fingers, without being at the whim of some old crone sitting behind the counter.

  And so the feeling is very familiar to me. You need to tell someone something important – that you love them very much, for example – but they just aren’t home. Fifteen minutes later they are still not there. And fifteen minutes after that.

  Our mental landscape was entirely different back then. There were the connecting nodes and then there were big black holes, a wilderness where your cry would never be heard. It was impossible to phone someone directly: you could only phone one of these connecting points, without knowing whether or not the person would actually answer.

  I remember an advert for mobile phones which covered the whole side of a Tallinn tram. I can’t remember exactly what year it was, but it was some time immediately after independence, in the early 1990s. It was an advert for a really tiny handset, much more elegant than those you would normally see people with, with a price tag of twelve thousand kroons. My salary at the time was somewhere in the region of one thousand kroons a month, so this was more or less my income for a year (and we were relatively well off).

  But that was all later, some time later than the day in question, when Indrek stood by the corner of the grey fire station and observed what was happening, and then hurried off to look for a public phone to call Raim, the person who had ended up in the role of leader of their small group, who was only called Raimond by his parents. In those days the main worries associated with telephones w
ere whether you had a two-kopeck coin on you, whether the phone you found actually worked, and whether the person you called would be home. Not whether so-and-so’s phone battery might be flat, or whether someone is inside the coverage area. Times change, but problems remain.

  At the moment when the telephone rings, Raim is sitting having lunch with his parents. There is a tablecloth on the table, not because it is some sort of special occasion, but because that had always been the custom in Raim’s mother’s home, even if it meant they had to wash their tablecloths more often; they had a washing machine for that very purpose. Not one of those front-loading Vyatka automatics with a window in the door – she wasn’t sure whether she could really trust one of those – but the far simpler Aurika, where you had to lift your washing from one compartment to another so that the drier could do its work. But anyway, Raim’s mother has cooked some meatballs today. And at this very moment Raim’s father has just lifted up a mouthful on the end of his fork, and it is halfway to his open mouth. We don’t realise straightaway that they are meatballs, because they are swamped in sauce. Raim’s mother is in the habit of simmering her meatballs in sauce for a few minutes before serving them, again because this was the custom in her family – even though Raim and his father preferred their meatballs dry and crunchy. But the piece of meat on the end of Raim’s father’s fork hasn’t come to a standstill halfway to his mouth because he’s fighting his aversion to the food. No, Raim’s father’s mouth is open because he’s preparing to say something. And he knows exactly what that will be, even if he hasn’t fully formulated the sentence yet. Clearly it will be something to do with politics. Raim’s father wants to say that in the current situation only a crazy person, someone who is totally ignorant, who has taken complete leave of their senses, an idiot in fact, would say anything to rock the boat, which is sailing steadily towards a better and freer life. It’s never a good idea to poke a sleeping bear. The finest minds in the West have said that too, experts in their field, Sovietologists in academic institutes, each with a budget bigger than the whole Estonian economy. Moscow holds the keys. It isn’t a good idea to be hasty now that the straightjacket is starting to come apart at the seams. They should just keep moving cautiously towards the destination and be happy with what they have. For him personally it’s more important that he can go on a trip to Finland without having to apply for permission from the relevant departments (and that he’s allowed to exchange more than thirty-five roubles), not whether the blue, white and black flag of Estonian independence flutters on the Tall Hermann tower of Toompea Castle. And he’s convinced that the majority of the Estonian people, or at least those who are capable of thinking rationally, are of exactly the same opinion. Raim’s father knows that once he has formulated and stated his sentence it will lead to an argument. That Raimond, his only son, this blond-haired, broad-shouldered boy with his wilfully jutting chin, who can become all those things which he was not, will disagree with him again. That’s how it normally goes. He doesn’t like it, and who would, but he’s resigned to it. At least that way he has some sort of relationship with his son. It was the same way with his own father when he was young. And so he is annoyed when the phone call interrupts his chain of thought. But Raim is not, because for him those arguments with his father have long since lost any purpose. He doesn’t yet know who is calling, or if the call is even for him, but he has already decided that if someone is looking for him, then he will use it as an excuse to flee this scene of domestic bliss. So what if he is still hungry. If the meatballs weren’t covered in sauce, he would pick one up as he ran out of the room. But this is the way things are.

  Things weren’t exactly how the authorities thought they were back then: that a multitude of isolated, downtrodden people were embracing a vision of happiness and a historical mission which required them to speak a foreign language and to celebrate a foreigner’s victories – a vision which promised to unite them, to restore them, to make them greater. Neither were things as some people like to remember them today: cinders glowing valiantly in every hearth, ready to blaze up into a tall, proud flame as soon as the first bugle call was heard. There was a quiet war being waged for sure, but it was so quiet that even the sharpest ears might not pick up the rumble of its cannons, and the clever chaps abroad had concluded that peoples’ backs were so bowed that they would never stand upright again. That is until the newspapers told them quite how wrong they had been, leaving them unable to explain exactly what had happened. There was a quiet war being fought, but without a frontline moving backwards and forwards on demarcated territory. In the place of trenches there was something more like the circulation of blood, or mushroom spores: thousands, hundreds of thousands of little frontlines, passing through meeting rooms, wedding parties, family photographs, through individual people, who could be upstanding Soviet functionaries from nine to five and then turn into fervent idealists watching Finnish television in the evenings. But there is no point in asking if things could have been otherwise, only why those people’s descendants are the same to this day, even if they have changed their colours. The printed money wasn’t worth much back then, even if there were plenty of sweaty-palmed people with no scruples about handling it. There was however another important currency in circulation – trust. Some may use simpler terms such as acquaintances, contacts, but nothing would have counted without trust. Because in the end it was impossible to trust anyone if you hadn’t gone to school together, shared the same sauna, gone scrumping with them, studied together, worked in the same office, done military service together, stolen something, eaten and drunk with them, slept with them. If you trusted someone, you could share your books, your telephone numbers, your smoked sausage, your summer house, anything you had, even trust itself – names, places, times. You didn’t use a dentist whom you didn’t trust, you didn’t ask someone to pass a letter to your Swedish relatives if you didn’t trust them. If you could help it you had nothing to do with people you did not trust – they might very well be working for the other side.

  Trust was the only valid currency.

  It was just so exhausting.

  And so we used that trust to pay for our freedom, and we’re still collecting the change to this day.

  If you happen to be a citizen of the Kingdom of Sweden, and your name is Kenneth Lindblom, then you can be quite sure that your decision to stay at Kungla Hotel instead of the more usual Viru Hotel would have led to questions in the relevant departments. So what if you also happen to be a television reporter and Kungla Hotel is across the road from the offices of Estonian Television. Viru Hotel is not more than a short walk from there either. But Kungla Hotel lacks all those things which you, as a citizen of Sweden, might expect from a visit to the Soviet Union (since you’re not a pensioner, and a bus trip to the ruins of Pirita Cloister or a visit to the building complex which hosted the 1980 Olympic regatta are probably of no interest to you). In Kungla Hotel there is no hard currency bar with its lavish selection of drinks; there is not even a hard currency shop where you can buy yourself a six-pack of Finnish beer to quaff in the quiet of your room. And the room itself leaves a lot to be desired. But above all there are no hard-currency prostitutes with respectable exteriors and perfectly tolerable Finnish but smiles which instantly give them away. Of course the relevant departments know that you are a Swede who doesn’t speak Finnish, but that doesn’t change a thing – there are none of those girls at this hotel regardless. It’s true that the Kungla Hotel does have a bar which looks like the West to tourists from Moscow and Leningrad (since their understanding of what the West looks like largely comes from Russian films where the action takes place overseas, a significant number of which were filmed in Tallinn). But that probably doesn’t hold any attraction for you, since it’s hardly likely that you have come to Tallinn to sit in a dimly lit drinking den with 1970s interior design.

  In short: there is nothing here.

  The real reason your decision to stay in this hotel causes questions in the relevant
departments is because it lacks something important which the other hotels have: this hotel only recently received authorisation to accommodate foreign tourists, so there is no eavesdropping equipment here. There apparently isn’t even any equipment in the bar because during the last renovation, instructions reportedly came from the Communist Party Central Committee to leave the place alone so that party functionaries could come here and relax undisturbed.

  But if you are a citizen of the Kingdom of Sweden, then the relevant departments will start to ask questions. Especially if you are a television reporter, your name is Kenneth Lindblom, and you have just recently filmed a story about a large meeting of writers, artists, composers and other so-called intellectuals which took place in Toompea Castle with the connivance of some of the local authorities, during which people gave the current regime a piece of their mind. Then they will surely want to know why the hell you have chosen to stay in this central hotel which lacks the necessary equipment. Isn’t it blindingly obvious?

  Kenneth Lindblom was in a splendid mood. He’d just finished doing a long interview with Heinz Valk, who had made it very clear what he meant when he said “we are sure to win in the end”. True, he’d only recorded the sound, but he had a whole stack of photographs in his briefcase, including a couple from the heritage protection festival in Tartu, of a torchlit procession of students bearing the blue, black and white colours of the Estonian flag. Not together as one flag, but the message was clear enough.