The Death of the Perfect Sentence

by Rein Raud

  Because no, she couldn’t speak that language. Which still bothered Särg a little.

  She had the utmost respect for the Estonian people and their culture of course. “Kalevipoeg”, Tammsaare and all that. And the Song Festival. And unlike most in her circle of acquaintances she could say, “How’s it going?” and “Well, thanks” with a quite acceptable Estonian accent, and she could understand the numbers up to one hundred when a shopkeeper used them. But the rest of it was completely beyond her; there was no point in pretending otherwise.

  “Anyway, a woman’s language skills aren’t her most important quality,” she would say coquettishly to Särg, to which he had no choice but to concur. They managed just fine, after all. Särg’s Russian had got much better from constant practice. What bothered him more was that their son Anton’s first words were in his mother’s and grandmother’s language, whereas he responded to anything his father said with funny cute noises which his wife’s side of the family said sounded exactly like Estonian, and made them laugh heartily. Which Anton of course took as encouragement.

  They rarely visited Särg’s parents in the countryside; he knew very well that he could never bring himself to tell his father where he was now working.

  Anton did not in fact learn to speak Estonian as a child at all. Särg’s working days were long and he often had to be away at weekends, so he played a modest part in his son’s upbringing. In any case, whenever he did have some free time Galina would claim it for herself, and they would go to Sõprus cinema and then to Gloria restaurant for dinner, since Särg’s mother-in-law was quite happy to look after Anton. All four of them would go on holiday to the Crimea together, where they always rented two rooms, and Anton would be in one of them with Grandma.

  The problems started when Anton got older, when he began playing outdoors and found himself caught between two camps. He was in the same predicament at school. Anton attended Middle School No. 47, where they were fostering friendship between the peoples by having the Estonian and Russian classes together in one building, with a full set of teachers for every subject in each language. Anton didn’t mix with the Estonian boys, and while the Russians tolerated his presence they didn’t treat him as one of their own because of his surname. Anyway, they needed someone to tease, and he fitted the role very well. In fact that probably wasn’t because of his name, but because he was short in stature, just like his father wore thick-rimmed glasses due to his poor eyesight, and wasn’t particularly sporty. The main thing was that he would never tell on them to teacher. Anton himself saw things differently of course. He didn’t understand why being a little bit Estonian was such a problem for the playground bullies. Nor why he always had to play the role of fascist in their war games.

  If we always knew in advance what was going to happen, we would behave like machines. So in a sense it is the unexpected things in life that make us who we are.

  But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as they say.

  As a teenager Anton gradually grew further apart from his parents. Their world was of no interest to him, nor did he want to share his world with them. But his parents saw no cause for worry: his marks were good and he was even sent to take part in the Estonian Soviet Republic’s Physics Olympiad – although he’d actually started to get more interested in history, especially after his two history teachers, the Estonian one and the Russian one, had a shouting match in the staffroom that nearly came to blows. And by now he’d begun studying Estonian diligently, although he still found it difficult, and he didn’t use it at home with his father. To be honest, he didn’t speak much with his father at all.

  Anyway, what would a true Estonian man have to say to a Russified spook?

  It had already gone five when Ervin, Tarts and Pille appeared through the cellar door; Anton had to go straight home. They didn’t know what Indrek wanted to tell them, so they’d kept him waiting. They were in a jolly mood when they arrived since their collection jar had ended up quite full by the end of the day, much fuller than the previous week.

  “It started raining in the end,” Tarts said. “We’ll probably have to make some new posters. And paint some new freckles on to Ervin.” They all laughed. At least they now had enough money to buy some card and paints.

  Once they had heard out Indrek and Raim they realised that they had much bigger problems on their hands. Things were pretty bad. But then, although they didn’t forget their friend for a moment, the customary tone started to return to their conversation: that jaunty banter, that self-belief. If only they could believe it within themselves, then they really could be free, right here and right now.

  Ervin looked at his friends – because they were still his friends, despite everything that had happened – and experienced a feeling which was strange but not exactly unpleasant. He was the only one in that room who knew that there was now an invisible line running between them, separating them from each other. Of course he knew that what he’d done could not possibly fit into their shared conception of right and wrong. And, believe it or not, he still wanted to belong to their group, to be one of the few who dared to stand up and say how things really were, to proclaim the imminent arrival of freedom, in which no one would be imprisoned over their convictions or force-fed through a tube when they went on hunger strike. Or at least part of Ervin felt like that. The other part, which normally showed itself at night, or when he was hung-over, was quite sure that their activities were hopeless and pointless, that the enemy was tolerating them just for the sake of appearances. Because the enemy knew it could crush them flat as soon as it deemed necessary. Shave off Ervin’s red locks and chuck him into a dingy cell or send him to Siberia, from where he would return a different person. Ervin knew that would be a senseless sacrifice, and he was not prepared to make it. Anyway, what kind of nation entrusted the struggle for independence to a handful of young lads, who had still not learned to stand upright, to say nothing of falling in love, or mourning the dead. And what kind of nation then skulks off to its comfortable-enough den, its soft-enough bed, under its warm-enough blanket, to watch their struggle from a distance. He envied those friends who were prepared to stand to the last, and he wished he felt the same way. But there was nothing he could do. That’s just how things were. And it was now especially strange to listen to their joshing, after what he’d done today. This was no longer his world. Of course, when Madisson and then Bötker were exiled to Sweden, he realised that the career of a freedom fighter could actually conclude quite pleasantly. Why not follow them there? And if, contrary to any logic, things were to turn out as his wonderful, naïve friends thought – intoxicated as they were by their collective self-deception – and some sort of Estonian Republic were to make a comeback, then at least he would have made a contribution. As well as standing in the picket, he’d drawn swastikas on Soviet statues at night and had been on lookout duty a couple of times when Hangman’s gang went to nick the wheels off the commies’ cars. Just like that night when they were caught – and he was offered the chance of getting off more lightly.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t sometimes get the urge to admit everything to the others. They were his friends after all, they would understand, they would forgive him, fuck Sweden, we’ll go there some time later, they would say. And anyway, they could use the situation Ervin had got himself into to further the cause. The KGB now trusted him and could be fed all sorts of rubbish, be steered on to any old idiots, who would find themselves at the headquarters on Pagari Street instead of him and his friends.

  But no. Ervin stayed quiet, in an exemplary fashion.

  He still does.

  I remember one time back in 1988 (or was it 1989?): I was reading some information about the freedom movement on the wall by the Pegasus café when I came across the name of a man I had once fleetingly encountered a dozen or so years previously, back at middle school, when I took an interest in Esperanto. Let’s say this was him: clean-shaven but with a thick head of hair, chubby, his cheeks always rosy, which g
ave him a rather comical and utterly benign appearance – like the funny friend of the protagonist in romantic films, or the sad clown in the circus.

  In the end he didn’t quite succeed in becoming a politician.

  And he is dead now, as I discovered when I tried to track him down.

  His name was Valev. He was soft-spoken by nature, but when he got worked up he had the habit of waving his arms about without even noticing he was doing so. He never gave out his own number; he would always phone you.

  There were two of them walking along, one of them taller, with broad shoulders and a chin which jutted determinedly forward, he was walking a bit slower. The other was older, shorter, but more edgy and animated, evidently his companion’s mentor, the one who was in charge. They walked back and forth along the road between the Victory Square underpass and St Charles’ Church, making sure that no one was watching in front or behind. Raim was speaking while Valev listened with a worried expression on his face.

  “It’s a real drag, that’s for sure,” Valev said, casting a quick glance over his shoulder, “and I hope that Karl bears up. It’s going to be really tough for him. I’m afraid that if they don’t let him go after a couple of days that means that they’re getting properly stuck into him. They’re particularly brutal at the moment.”

  A passer-by looked in their direction and Valev fell silent for a moment.

  “Because we’ve actually won already, you know,” he said. “I found out – don’t ask how – that an order was sent from Moscow, from the head of the KGB himself, telling them to work out a plan for going underground. Including cover stories for their own people and contact points for transferring funds in the future. And of course a network for blackmail operations.”

  “Aha,” said Raim.

  “That means two things,” Valev said. His voice almost became a whisper, and his cheeks started to flush. “Firstly, that we’ll get our country back, sooner or later. That’s certain. No doubt about it any more. But secondly, because there is a secondly as well … if their plan succeeds, we might end up with a maggoty apple. You understand what I mean, an apple full of maggots.” Raim thought he could see Valev trying to trace the shape of an apple in the air. “A maggoty apple.” Then his arms fell limply on either side of him, he cleared his throat and recovered his voice: “That is if we don’t do anything to stop it.”

  “So what can we do?” Raim asked.

  Valev started to explain. He looked around again and then took an object wrapped in yesterday’s paper from inside his coat.

  It was a miniature camera, originally invented by one Walter Zapp, an engineer of Baltic German extraction who had lived in Tallinn’s Nõmme district in 1936 before moving to Riga. Now known as the Minox EC, it had been significantly improved in the intervening years, was being manufactured in Germany, and had earned renown as the world’s smallest photographic device, capable nevertheless of producing very high-resolution pictures.

  And he also had a name to give Raim. Someone who had been stirred from the silence of the shadows: Gromova.

  But now, dear reader, something more pleasant awaits us: let us leave behind this weary land for a while.

  This journey is not an easy one, but it is not the first time that we embark on it, and we even have foreign passports for the purpose, kept in a safe place at home. A few years ago the authorities took them away from anyone who had travelled overseas as soon as they got home, with the exception of a few especially trustworthy persons. But in recent times it is no longer so rare for people like us to have our passports in our possession all the time. We have also managed to get hold of multiple-entry Finnish visas, arranged by our old acquaintances from the Friedebert Tuglas Society in Helsinki who have been visiting Estonia for years now, bringing with them coffee, books and tights, together with anything else necessary for a dignified existence. We have known them since we were teenagers, and have practised the Finnish we learned from television with them. The last time we were in Finland we even stayed with them in Espoo, feeling a little embarrassed that we arrived from the event we were at quite late and a little tipsy, although we managed not to wake up their grandchildren.

  Fortunately things are a little different this time. We even have our own hotel rooms, and not just in any old hotel, but in the Hesperia (now a Crowne Plaza hotel). We have got ourselves on the guest list for a celebratory reception put on by a Soviet-Finnish joint venture, recently set up with the aim of using Finnish equipment to produce paper for the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union has no paper. That is, there is enough for the newspapers, but books sometimes have to wait years to be printed. Although not for much longer, if one is to believe the documents which both parties signed ceremoniously today.

  We don’t see that happening because the signing event is only meant for the delegates, but we will still get into the party in the evening. Don’t worry, we have an official invitation, arranged for us by the same Friedebert Tuglas Society. Because if there is paper, then books can be published, and that is something which writers will want to celebrate, to say nothing of their readers.

  So as the agreement between Director of Karelia Trade Yrjö Paananen and Soviet Minister for Forestry and Timber Mikhail Ivanovich Bussygin, which makes the factory possible, is signed in the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki, and the first chink of champagne glasses rings out, we are still waiting in the customs queue in Tallinn harbour, which is particularly slow today. But it always seems that way. You try to look calm, and you pull it off pretty well, or at least I suspect nothing, but of course you can’t fool the customs official. I only have my possessions yanked out of my bags, but you have your pockets searched as well. Thankfully the one-hundred-mark note you got from your cousin is hidden in your sock, and the customs official eventually resigns himself to finding nothing, deciding that the edginess he read on your face was just because of the irksome experience you were being put through, which was of course quite possible. Tomorrow you will take that one-hundred-mark note to the electronics shop on Iso Roobertinkatu Street and use it to buy a “Tallinn kit”, which costs forty-two marks and contains a couple of tiny components that your cousin can use to make his new TV set show Finnish television with colour and sound. The same thing would cost several times more on the black market in Tallinn, so your cousin is happy to let you keep the change, but you promise that you will treat him to a glass of the whisky which an acquaintance is going to give you to take home. Anyway, we’re now safely up the ramp and on board the ship, which is named after the Estonian singer Georg Ots. We walk about, looking enviously at the Finns and those few Estonians who have bought themselves a beer at the bar. We have alcohol with us as well, but we are taking it to our acquaintances in Finland. Some of the Finns anyway look like they no longer have much need for the bar: they’re barely able to stand upright as it is. One of them is making no attempt to hide his interest in the girls in fancy white blouses and denim skirts as they walk past.

  Eventually we find one of the ship’s dimly lit cafés – too dark to read, but at least the Estonian waitress can pretend that she can’t see that we have ordered nothing, and leave us to our own devices, making no claims on our scant supply of hard currency. And so our journey goes, a bit hungrily, thirstily and joylessly, but at least in the right direction. You have brought two apples with you, and you treat me to one of them. Thank you for that. An hour before arrival we take up position by the exit so as to avoid waiting in the queue for too long. The Finns don’t have to worry about that, there is a separate queue for them; they must do little more than walk past the border guard with their passports held open. Just in case, you pull the one-hundred-mark note out of your sock before we leave the café; even though our invitation says we will be looked after and our bills paid, the border guard may ask us to show some money. Just to make sure that we remember our place.

  As if it were possible to forget.

  Reality

  Actually, the first time I went to Finland I didn’t use th
is boat: I took the bus through Leningrad and Vyborg and then travelled onwards along the coast. We had to get to a gathering of Finnish and Estonian poets, and the whole thing was nearly called off because Gorbachev had requisitioned the Georg Ots ferry to travel to Reykjavík and meet Ronald Reagan. But we still decided to go.

  At one event there, an elderly woman asked me what I found most remarkable about Finland. She said she liked to collect peoples’ first impressions, as they gave her a fresh perspective on her homeland. I replied that it was the petrol stations. I explained that when I was a child I had Matchbox cars brought back for me from Finland, and my classmate Peeter Laurits got given loads of Lego bricks. And so we played with them, building miniature models of a reality which was absent from our own lives. Now, years later, it was strange to see the petrol stations there by the roadside, as if a wall between me and my childhood toys had crumbled, as if I had stepped across a dividing line which had been separating me from that reality.

  We are met at the harbour; a thin girl asks us to put our cases in the back of a minibus and she takes us to the Hesperia. We hear Estonian spoken from both sides of the foyer, but those girls aren’t connected with our delegation: they are wearing expensive clothes and smell of top-quality perfume. When they see us they fall silent, because we bring back memories. We hurriedly take our suitcases to our rooms and put our best clothes on – the reception has already begun. We enter the hall and are separated for a while – just in case, I let you know that the buffet nearest the door is meant for the Soviet delegation and consists mainly of vodka with or without juice, whereas at the other end of the hall you will find a pretty decent selection of wines, and the nibbles are just that little bit better too.