The Death of the Perfect Sentence

by Rein Raud

  As for Karl, he had a pretty decent collection of sports-themed stamps. Nothing exceptional, but all the same.

  “You shouldn’t let them beat him up like that, Comrade Major,” said Särg. “It doesn’t produce any results.”

  “I make the decisions around here,” Vinkel snorted. He actually agreed, but that didn’t mean he would let his subordinates tell him what to do. What’s more he was hungry, and his bosses had demanded a report from him, but he didn’t have any good news for them.

  “In that case I ask for your permission to return to the sixth department,” Särg requested. “I’ve got a lot of work on with my own cases anyway, and it’s looking pretty clear by now that this case doesn’t have anything to do with economic crime.”

  “Expressing our views, are we Comrade Captain?” Vinkel said with a wink. “You can actually be quite sure that you’ll soon be very interested in this particular case.”

  Särg didn’t understand what was meant by that. Unlike us, dear reader, because we have reason to suspect that this Anton – the one who didn’t return to the cellar from the picket with the others but went straight home – and Captain Särg’s son, the history buff and self-proclaimed true Estonian, are one and the same person. And from that it is easy to draw conclusions about the company which Anton Särg kept and who his friends were, and then to conjecture that it was very probable Anton Särg would eventually end up in one of the pictures taken by those plain-clothed policemen with their long-focus lenses as they sat and observed the insurrectionary youth.

  Anton could not shake the fear that he would never be fully accepted as one of the gang, even when they started giving him tasks which involved a high level of responsibility. He was terribly ashamed of his slight Russian accent and occasional slip-ups with the partitive plural, even if all the rest of them were completely used to it and took it as nothing more than a personal quirk. It never occurred to anyone to call him a bloody Russky.

  But this is how it had happened:

  The history teacher, Comrade Kovalyova, had been ill the day when she was supposed to teach an extra lesson on the subject of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and explain that the information spread by Western propaganda radio stations regarding some sort of secret protocol hadn’t been corroborated; Soviet historians had searched the archives for the document, but since it did not exist, it could not be found. Moreover, at the moment when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the non-aggression treaty it had been a necessary step, giving the leadership breathing room to prepare for the test of strength which was soon to ensue. And it was highly regrettable that so many people had allowed themselves to be misled, organising the so-called Baltic Chain and demanding the abrogation of something which didn’t even exist in the first place.

  It was that cold, dark time of year, teacher Kovalyova was already getting on in years, and she was not in the best of health, so there was nothing surprising about her falling ill. But that lesson couldn’t just be cancelled: the order had come from above and it had to be executed.

  So teacher Kovalyova had to give that lesson a week later, on the day on which Estonians celebrated Christmas.

  The extra history class took place straight after the other lessons were finished. Teacher Kovalyova had been in front of a class of students since morning and was already really tired, but as far as she was concerned she managed to deliver her text pretty enthusiastically and convincingly.

  “Are there any questions?” she asked. “Would anyone like any points clarified?”

  One hand went up. It was Class 9b’s top student, Anton Särg.

  “Go on, Anton,” said teacher Kovalyova.

  “There is one thing I would like clarifying,” said Anton, standing up. “If it is really true, as you say, that this additional protocol never existed, then why is it that the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies declared it null and void today, with effect from the moment it was signed.”

  Deportations.

  A war of independence – not the Civil War.

  Mass murder in Tartu’s prisons.

  And of course the Gulag.

  Now try saying something without lying for a change. Or just fuck off.

  Maarja and Raim were on the third floor of the Pegasus café. It was nice and quiet here during the day, just the odd hung-over poet coming up the stairs to check if there was anyone he knew, but there wasn’t. On a hot day like this it would have made more sense to be outside, Maarja thought. Looking out of the large windows towards the other side of the street, at the mounds outside Niguliste church, she could see ten or so smallish groups who had taken a seat, each with a plastic bag of goodies. But it was definitely more private here inside, that was true.

  Maarja had been unsure until the very last moment whether she would return to the picket. She couldn’t even say why she had put money into the collection jar. Naturally she wanted the same things as everyone else: she’d taken part in the unofficial singing nights and signed up for the Estonian Citizens’ Committee long ago, and during the congress of the Popular Front she had sat with her parents, glued to the radio from morning to evening. But she had yet to decide for herself whether it was a good thing that there were so many of those activists groups. On the one hand it could mean that one of them was bound to get lucky. But it could also mean that they would blow so much hot air fighting amongst themselves that the important things would simply be forgotten. So it was a little strange to find herself sitting there drinking cheap red wine with this guy who didn’t have any doubts of that kind.

  Otherwise, though, he was quite all right, even very much so. And he radiated some kind of power, some sort of certainty, so you were sure right away that you could rely on him, that he knew how things were. Not that Maarja found him attractive as such: despite all their inner confidence those blond, broad-shouldered types were a bit ordinary – not stupid or anything, ordinary in the right way, just like straight-talking and clean water. Transparent, yes, that was the right word. Not that he didn’t have any secrets, everyone had them, just that those secrets were somehow clear.

  It is true that it’s impossible to live without clean water, but clean water is not enough on its own.

  In any case it was pretty cool to be drinking wine with him. Anyway the other girls were either at work, in the countryside, or elsewhere.

  “May you live in interesting times”

  In 1936, shortly before Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen departed on a diplomatic mission to China, one of his friends told him about a Chinese curse he had once heard: “May you live in interesting times!” Or at least that is what Knatchbull-Hugessen claims in his memoires. There are some other British authors who appear to have known of such an expression too. The Chinese, however, do not. The closest thing in meaning which they have is the following: “It is better to live as a dog in peaceful times than as a human in a world of confusion.”

  And what about it?

  Just like anyone else, I have done things in my life which I am not proud of, and even one or two things which I regret. But I have no reason to be anything other than happy that I have lived in the period when I have, and that I have been able to experience one world changing into another. So what if this has stirred hungers in me which have damaged me? I am willing to pay that price, if only for the perspective it gave me, which is something I do not encounter in people who have lived under only one political order.

  You have to find someone who no one could ever, ever, link with you and your group, Valev had said. But in whom you can place absolute trust. That means less risk for that person, and more importantly, less risk for our cause. If it’s a schoolmate, relative, work brigade member, and they end up getting caught for some reason, then even if they keep their lips sealed you will have the security services at your door in half an hour flat.

  It’s easy for him to talk, Raim thought, but just try telling this girl that she now has to go and put everything on the line in the name of Estonian independence. />
  “What’s up?” Maarja asked, and she laughed her ringing laugh. “You’ve got an expression on your face like you’re about to make me a marriage proposal.”

  “So you get them often then?” Raim asked, and he laughed too.

  “Well at least a couple of times a week,” Maarja replied trying to keep a straight face, but not succeeding particularly well.

  When Alex got to work in the morning Konstantin Zakharovich gave him a slightly odd look before informing him that Gennady Vassilyevich was waiting for him in his office. Which meant he had to go and see him right away. Gennady Vassilyevich started by inquiring, with contrived joviality, how Alex was, and then told him that he would have to drop by the city administration, since the mayor’s foreign affairs advisor, one Vladimir Vladimirovich, apparently wanted to see him.

  Even after I put the final full stop in the draft of this story, it took me a long time to shake the moods which it evoked in me. It was hard to think of anything else. The story itself has changed quite a lot in the meantime, but the most important details have stayed the same. And I still feel that I am somehow trapped inside it. Although I am simultaneously unburdened of the parts of myself which I left there, and I feel that I can now write what I want – or even nothing at all.

  The first time I saw it was in a dream. Or at least, part of it, Maarja and Alex’s story, which we will get to soon. It was just like a film, in fact it really was a film which I was watching while I slept. But it took place in Poland. The café where they met was right inside the art museum there, not like the café in Kadriorg. But the museum was just like our one. I still remember the chinking of Maarja’s spoon against the plate as she ate her cake. So some memories never fade. It was summer in my dream and in real life, the sun was scorching hot and I could hear the gentle murmur of the sea.

  Without fully realising why, Alex sensed that this couldn’t mean anything good, since good news would normally just land on your desk in the course of other business, for no apparent reason. Good news was not something which you as an individual, specifically you, whoever you happened to be, would have earned, and where your role would have to be specifically emphasised. No, good news just happened by chance, since the reasons why the system might suddenly smile upon you would be random and unknowable, and had to remain that way. Bad news was something altogether different. It could involve you having to personally account for some misfortune which you had no way at all of preventing. Like, for example, when the father of one of Alex’s classmates oversaw the building of a children’s home which then burnt down, and this happened to be the same children’s home which the second secretary of the Communist Party’s regional office had personally opened on TV. It burnt down because the building brigade foreman had used up all the insulation materials which met the required fire safety standards to build a country cottage for his direct superior, the deputy director of the trust. But the system reacted swiftly and mercilessly against the father of Alex’s classmate, because it was his signature which was on the documentation signing off the building for use, there for everyone to see. Rights and responsibilities are not in fact equally balanced. You can easily end up being responsible without having any rights at all.

  In other words, if Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted to see Alex personally, it couldn’t mean good news. In the world of good news, Alex simply did not exist for Vladimir Vladimirovich.

  The Smolny Institute was originally established at some point in the beginning of the nineteenth century for the education of aristocratic young ladies. A hundred years or so later it housed Lenin’s headquarters and apartment, from where he oversaw the processes which engulfed the whole of the Russian Empire following the October Revolution. Now there were no longer any orders flying out from this building across the world, but the lifeblood of Leningrad and the surrounding region still flowed from here. Alex had never been to the Smolny before, but he could roughly imagine what it would be like: wide staircases, red carpets, high-ceilinged offices big enough to ride a bike through, probably built as classrooms originally, but now every important official had one to himself. And there to guard the peace would be reliable, bulldog-faced ladies over forty, who had no idea whatsoever what life without constant constipation could be like.

  Alex turned out to be a bit off-mark regarding those ladies. The woman sitting in Vladimir Vladimirovich’s outer office was no more than a couple of years older than him, she was elegant, stylishly dressed and wore glasses, and turned out to be friendly too. She offered him tea and told him he only had three-quarters of an hour to wait. Some sort of changes were clearly afoot.

  When Alex entered the office he breathed a sigh of relief. Vladimir Vladimirovich, a short fisheyed man, was sitting at his desk the other end of the office, but Alex had good eyesight so he could see what was there straight away – the latest issue of the Finnish weekly Suomen Kuvalehti, open at the pages containing Alex’s interview with Silja; Alex’s picture was on the left-hand page, and there was a picture of Alex’s uncle on the right. In other words, nothing too damning.

  “Now then,” said Vladimir Vladimirovich. “This here. Your doing, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “Yes,” said Alex with a nod.

  “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking,” Vladimir Vladimirovich continued. “You are aware that Olga Anatolyevna coordinates public relations for your department?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Alex with a nod.

  “So why did Olga Anatolyevna not know anything about your interview? Eh?”

  “I was planning…” Alex started to say.

  “Listen, will you let me speak or not?” Vladimir Vladimirovich glared at Alex just long enough for him to start to feel that he was expecting an answer, but Alex said nothing just in case. “Anyway, make sure you don’t do anything like this again.”

  Alex noticed a very handsome gold Swiss watch on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s wrist.

  “I’m sorry,” said Alex, “but I didn’t say anything out of line.”

  Vladimir Vladimirovich gave a weary sigh.

  “You don’t need me to explain anything further, I hope,” he said, picking up the newspaper and starting to leaf through it, almost as if he were seeking confirmation for what he’d just said. He’d already turned the pages five or six times when he next looked up from the table.

  “You’re still here?”

  Alex had got the message.

  But this is what happened next: the very moment when Alex closed the door of Vladimir Vladimirovich’s office behind him and felt his secretary’s sympathetic gaze on him, he for some reason recalled a feeling which he had last felt a very long time ago, during his first year at university. It was a feeling of yearning for another place, which he and his friends had once given a specific name. Back in those days the Marlboro-puffing Komsomol creeps got on everyone’s nerves. They would pepper their official speeches with Lenin and Brezhnev quotations without bothering to think about what they actually meant, and they would turn up at the parties organised by the prettiest girls in the student halls and tell filthy jokes, although they would be sure to keep their ties on at all times. Something just wasn’t quite right about it. The realities of student life didn’t help things much: in the autumn the students were taken out to the collective farm to dig potatoes for a month in place of their studies. They did a little work, but the ground was always cold and the tractor driver always drunk, so there wasn’t much left for it but to hit the vodka. Sometimes they were instructed to go to the vegetable warehouse on a Sunday, where they would be asked to sort through filthy boxes full of frozen, rotten crap, with scant chance of finding anything edible. And so, as unbelievable as it may now sound, they decided that the place they yearned for was North Korea. Because things must be different there. There, the students got up at five every morning of their own accord so as to have time to go and work in the factory for a couple of hours before lectures, and no one would feel any need for fancy clothes and Marlboros. You get my point. Back the
n they were sure that the same spirit must still exist somewhere in the Soviet Union, it had to. That ardour which had helped the Bolsheviks to beat the White Guards during the Russian Civil War, that belief in the cause.

  Now that same feeling, that same long-forgotten childish feeling reared into Alex’s conscience one again. Only to immediately shatter into little pieces, like a window smashed with a stone. Let’s be honest, it was long overdue.

  We see them at the moment when the same thought passes through both their minds: what if our marriage is over? Come to an end? Raim’s father is in the loo, he has just tugged his flies closed but not yet flushed the toilet, and he has coughed up the phlegm accumulated in his throat and spat it out. They’ve got a Polish toilet bowl, with a flush button on the side of the cistern, not a cord hanging from ceiling height. Meanwhile his wife, who expects him to be absent from the room for a while, has swiftly opened the drinks cabinet door, taken out a bottle of Kirsberry Danish liqueur and a glass, and started pouring herself a drink. The large glob of spit and phlegm strikes the surface of the water at exactly the moment when the stream of sweet sticky liquid reaches the bottom of the glass, and that is the very same moment when, completely independently of each other, they both think exactly the same thought: what if it is over, what if it really is? What next? Not that either of them had done anything wrong exactly, no, they strictly adhered to all the moral norms, or at least their understanding of those norms. But without some minor, petty breaking of the laws, rules and conventions, it was impossible to survive in a society which was organised so that every single person felt a little bit guilty before the state – which itself was completely pure and holy. After all, only humans make mistakes, the system was flawless. But let’s not stray from the subject. Raim’s mother blames herself for secretly having been a little too proud of her son. She’d already seen a perfect little man in him from that time at Grandfather’s funeral when, barely five, he was all dressed up in a black suit. It had seemed to come naturally to him to take up his place at the end of the row of people receiving the condolence messages and endure there for a whole hour and a half, looking serious and dignified as he shook every last guest’s hand. She remembered that image the clearest of all from her father-in-law’s funeral – not the journey to Pärnamäe, not the graveside speeches, nor the hysterical biddy and her dim daughter, whose existence they’d known nothing about while her father-in-law was still alive. No, she remembered her grown-up little boy most of all. He still caused a slight sense of unease which she couldn’t properly describe; she still wanted to poke her head round his door every evening and wave him goodnight, but it just wasn’t appropriate any more. Her tough little boy. But maybe she shouldn’t have made so many assumptions. A person can’t be shiny and indestructible like a precious stone – and even some of those can be quite opaque. But once you have got used to thinking of them as strong, then it doesn’t occur to you that they may also have their weaknesses, and may occasionally need your help. Raim’s mother did not know what her son’s weaknesses were, but something clearly wasn’t right if he didn’t come home at night any more. It’s not that he simply didn’t turn up, leaving her waiting until morning, sitting in the kitchen tugging on a cigarette; he would phone in the evening and inform them that he wasn’t coming home, but with no further explanation. You’re not going to say: What do you mean you’re not coming? We’re having cheesecake for pudding and the latest episode of Hercule Poirot is showing on Finnish television. Because if he still doesn’t come, then it must be your fault, you must have been doing something wrong all along, why else would he rather be somewhere else? Raim’s father asks himself the same question, although from a different perspective: Maybe I should have been stricter with him, demanded more of him? You should always ask more of someone who is capable. Meanwhile he is waiting to hear the plopping sound at any moment, because the glob of spit and phlegm has already reached the surface of the water; technically the process which will produce the plop has already begun, it’s just that the air vibrations have not yet transmitted that information to his ears. Maybe I should have insisted on a regime of early rising and workouts; that would have been good for me as well. We went running in the forest now and again in the summer, he liked that; we did squats and pressups by the tree felled by the storm. Maybe I should have thought something up for winter as well, like cold showers to toughen the constitution, and I could have fixed a bar in the doorway to do chin-ups. Although to hell with cold water, the main thing is discipline, order, respect for one’s parents. It’s just not on, phoning like that and saying you’re not coming home, without a word of explanation about where you are or what you’re doing. What kind of home is it if you can just decide not to come back like that? What kind of family? No kind of family at all. Hell. Damn it. I toil like a draught horse and that’s the thanks I get. And then, a millisecond or so later, the plopping sound reaches his ears, he presses the flush and the water washes everything away. But what it leaves behind, his world, is just the same as before. Raim’s parents don’t yet know it, but in less than ten years Estonian television will start to show home-grown serials depicting everyday life, and the scriptwriters will try to create characters just like them for the viewers to have a well-meaning laugh at. And Raim’s parents will laugh too, because they won’t recognise themselves in those characters. And that is for the best.