An eighteen-year-old Estonian Swedish girl in that block sat peacefully knitting throughout the interview. She had blue-grey eyes clear like glass, and spoke Swedish in a low, slightly gravelly voice, searching for words, but well. Her father was from Ormsö, the island owned by the Swedish Baron von Stackelberg, which the Swedish missionary Österblom had lifted out of alcoholic poverty. Her father had kept his Swedish identity, and as a result he was not allowed in the Pioneers, the Soviet youth organisation. She and her brother had also identified as Estonian Swedes. She had decided already as a child that she wanted to be Swedish.
I asked why she said there were so many people here who were “actively Russian,” meaning Soviet-minded Estonians. The Swedish high school started in 1990, and she was a border in the first year. I asked what was different in the beginning. “We had a lot of contact with the villagers then,” she said, “especially the ones who like to start the day with fifty grams of vodka.” Now that was not the case anymore. The high school students were, on the whole, slightly contemptuous of the villagers; they were seen as provincial, alcoholic, promiscuous, and lazy. The poor were increasingly marginalised. The alcoholics sat on the wide windowsill of the old shop, glassy-eyed and red-faced, quietly drinking.
That night I walked towards the old dairy. The pine trees shivered in the wind against what was left of the pink sky, a single star in the gathering blue. I thought about how being here might affect my own Swedish identity. I felt ambivalent about going back to London, anticipating missing these late twilight walks. I knew that once I left I would be unlikely to come back, and I was sad about that. My fieldwork was coming to an end. I didn’t feel well; a certain shakiness was creeping in, interspersed with a slightly feverish excitement. Many nights were broken, haunted by a recurring sense of the utter strangeness of being there. The days came and went, and I didn’t look forward to any of them.
By the beginning of July I had interviewed almost everyone in the village. At that point I went to interview Ivar. He was, unexpectedly, at home, in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. He looked strong and solid, his feet in old brown socks. I was barefoot. I asked him all the survey questions in Estonian, and then we spoke, both in Estonian and in Swedish. He seemed younger speaking Estonian—we had, up until then, only spoken Swedish. I asked to see the archive of Samfundet för Estlandssvensk Kultur, the Society of Estonian Swedish Culture, that he administered, and he jumped up, saying, “One moment! I must tidy up a little.” It was a small room with broad metal shelves, stacked with books, about fifteen boxes yet unpacked. In the autumn forty more boxes were coming, a single donation from a Swede he knew. They had also received a grant from the Swedish Institute of about £10,000, a fortune in the context of the village, earmarked for the library.
After Ivar I had only sixteen flats left to survey, people who didn’t ever seem to be at home. The traditional Song Festival was on in Tallinn, as was the less well known Dance Festival. I watched some of it on TV, getting up every ten minutes or so to switch the TV off and on when the picture disappeared. At the dance stadium, a horse-drawn carriage with a man and a woman appeared: Kalev and Linda—mythical figures from the Estonian national epic, Kalevipoeg (“Kalev’s Son”), collated in the nineteenth century from folk tales similar to the Finnish Kalevala. The dancers formed themselves into a large cross around them, to a monotonous unaccompanied song. After that each county danced in turn, complex and symbolic dances. West Estonia, Läänemaa, was symbolised by barrels of beer, forming the centre of four circles. On each barrel a man with two beakers in his hands stood, and swayed, with the song. “Beer and the sea,” the TV commentator said blandly, “are the two themes from Läänemaa.” This was less impressive than the foregoing, but even so something about the aesthetic was appealing: it transcended, and preceded, modern notions of stylishness. The stout figures on the barrels, moving with their beakers, were an image of rural comfort, of Carnival fighting Lent, of strength and fat, of times of plenty.
After that the women started dancing with each other, without the men. They sang, too. An older woman in traditional dress sang the solo part, voice wavering and uneven, all the others around her joining in the chorus. The effect was almost sacral; the significance was in her persona rather than her voice. An eerie chant with drumming followed, and all the dancers formed one large square moving slowly with the music. Linda announced a litany for the dancers: “Dance, dance, our dance.” Then she spoke formally, quoting, I think from the Kalevipoeg. The men removed their hats. It was very quiet.
My hands swelled from typing too much in the heat. I went for a walk to the abandoned field behind the manor house, beyond the old park, and waded through the tall grass to the tree in the middle. I lay down on the ground, and the wind shook the branches above me. I was hidden from sight. The sun streamed through the green leaves. That evening the scrubby pieces of land between the blocks of flats were turned into hayfields. A boy of about twelve was cutting the long grass with a scythe, two women raking and collecting it behind him. It was the height of summer.
Around that time I went for an all-day cycle ride with Ivar; his friend Allan, the museum director; and Mart Niklus, the MP and former dissident. Niklus was originally a zoologist, specialising in ornithology, who had translated Charles Darwin into Estonian. Antonia Fraser, who was then president of English PEN, wrote about his case in the first 1988 issue of Index on Censorship: “The adoption of the Estonian Mart Niklus is in keeping with PEN’s policy to support members of ‘minority’ cultures who believe that their traditions and language have a right to co-exist with those of the great powers.” At that time Niklus was serving a ten-year sentence at a “special regime” camp known as Perm 36-1, located in the Permskaya region at the foot of the Ural Mountains. He was due to be released in 1990, followed by five years of internal exile. Because of pressure from PEN, and because of glasnost and perestroika, he was released early, in 1988. Estonian was banned in the camp. Shortly before that article was written he had been beaten for speaking Estonian to his mother, who spoke little Russian, when she visited him. He suffered from radiculitis, a form of spinal nerve inflammation, and stomach pains. He had been on hunger strike many times. “His most recent sentence,” Antonia Fraser ended her article, “was for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.’”
Article 62 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution
1. Citizens of the USSR are obliged to safeguard the interests of the Soviet state, and to enhance its power and prestige.
2. Defence of the Socialist Motherland is the sacred duty of every citizen of the USSR.
3. Betrayal of the Motherland is the gravest of crimes against the people.
We cycled first to Saare. Herbert, a farmer, and his wife drove us on their lorry through newly cut hayfields on to some moorland in the southern part of the peninsula. We left the lorry and walked: Mart Niklus barefoot; Ivar with binoculars and a small round smile; Herbert, tall and intense, smiling, gold tooth glinting; his wife striding along behind him. Essentially we were looking for birds, for Mart Niklus, but we also had a destination: a huge split rock near the sea. The flat quiet land was eerie, like a savannah, with a high sky. At times we had to cut a path through stretches of reed, Mart Niklus walking gingerly, last, toes bleeding.
Herbert and his wife invited us for sandwiches in their garden afterwards: a plate of jam and one of pate, Fanta “for the women,” beer for the men, and coffee. Afterwards he drove us back to Pürksi. I sat in happy silence with Ivar and the bikes on the back of the lorry. It was still morning. Now we cycled west to the sea, where I swam, alone, and we ate our picnic. We tried, after that, to take a shortcut through the uninhabited area in the northwest of the peninsula, but we couldn’t get through. Instead we followed an overgrown road leading us back the way we came. We cycled on towards the church and Hara, through the scent of the newly cut hay and the flowers. Niklus identified birds from their song in perfect English, Allan
talked about the Soviet curriculum of the history degree in Tartu, and Ivar was quiet, with a pleased and only slightly ironic smile.
Outside Hara by the sea we had our second picnic. “We must eat everything now, you see,” Niklus told me. By this time we were tired and giggly, and Ivar started telling jokes. I now remember only the one about the Estonian definition of hell. The answer was a group of Latvians singing around the campfire with their arms around one another: Estonian ironic disdain.
We had already seen one Soviet watchtower where I swam, and now we cycled on towards another. We climbed up the rusty and rickety staircase, and stood in the little chamber of rotting wood at the top. An old sign described, in Russian, what to do if an enemy was sighted at sea. There was such a strange dissonance between the sign, the tower, and the guard hut below, and the coastline itself: idyllic blue sea, the evening sun, a family of swans bobbing on the waves.
“They are teaching their children to fish!” said Ivar, delighted, watching through his binoculars.
“Do swans fish?” Allan asked. None of us knew.
The three of us stood close together in the tower. Ivar watched Niklus down below, walking slowly by the water. “He is looking for birds,” he said mildly. “Imagine now,” he continued, “if we were soldiers up here and he was an enemy down there. What would we do?”
“How did they communicate with the hut?” I asked, and he said, mock impatiently, “They telephoned, they had telephones here, you can still see the wires,” which was absurdly funny because there were no wires left; the soldiers took everything like that with them. All the watchtowers and the buildings next to them had a similar feel: abandoned, either building sites or ruins, unfinished or stripped. It was hard to tell whether they had been abandoned before they were ready, and whether they were looted before or after they were abandoned. Those kinds of buildings always looked new—Soviet new—badly laid white-grey bricks, small squat buildings, sometimes with odd towers sticking up from the roof. This one had a random concrete path leading nowhere—it looked as though someone had started it, and then stopped when the concrete ran out.
Moving about on the peninsula, you were constantly reminded of the Soviet times. It was the background to people’s conversations, the keynote people always came back to. We stopped at a farm to ask for water, and found a slightly drunk elderly couple, dressed in rags, probably no more than sixty years old, if that. The man had only two front teeth left. They were lowering the bucket to give us some water from the well when their son drove up in an old orange Lada, Soviet cigarette in his mouth. The daughter-in-law was in a skimpy red bikini, and there were two watchful little girls in the back, dressed in stiff skirts and tucked in hand-me-down jumpers. We drank the yellowish well water, whilst they talked to us about how the “Russians” had destroyed everything. Later, Allan explained to me that when the “locals” talked about the “Russians,” they really should talk about the Soviet system, but they were not educated enough to be able to distinguish between the two. It was, ironically, a most Soviet addendum, that intelligentsia complaint about the idiocy of the countryside.
On the way to Hara were a couple of restored farmhouses that had been turned into summerhouses. We cycled past one of them, a green sweep of lawn and two Western but Estonian registered cars on the drive. A couple sunning themselves in swimming costumes and sunglasses looked up from their comfortable chairs, their newspapers: a surreal vision from another world.
We got back to the village just past nine, with me in the lead because I was the most tired. Ivar politely hung back, and shouted merrily as I slowly cycled past the speed sign entering the village: “Sigrid! Slow down! It’s seventy here!” Later we had dinner at his flat. I brought over a bean stew I had already made, two bottles of beer, and some vodka. Niklus didn’t want any vodka: it was too associated with Soviet alienation and decadence for him—everything he was against.
Ivar energetically chopped onion leaves, a substitute for chives, and mixed it with sour cream. Niklus tried to get us to mix the remaining margarine, all melted now, with the beans, a poignant reminder of his time in the camp. We ate the beans with pasta, and without vodka. “Beans,” Allan kept saying sleepily, reminded of Mr. Bean, which had been running on TV. After dinner he read aloud from an old hagiography of Stalin, for fun. Niklus left soon afterwards, and Ivar brought out my vodka bottle and put it on the table. I did nothing, not realising that he was waiting for me to offer it, and finally, with a small impatient gesture, he said, “Well, can we pour it out?” and I said, “Yes, yes, of course.” Allan mixed the vodka with Swedish custard powder, assuring us slightly defensively that it was very good. He kept falling asleep, whilst Ivar played particular pieces of Estonian music from the mid-1980s for me: grave avant-garde ensembles, some based on folk songs, most with no lyrics. One famous one was dedicated to the typewriter, and featured a typewriter as an instrument, subtly antibureaucratic, and hence anti-Soviet. “That was the time for Estonian music,” he said. “Now it’s all in English, all the same.” Then it was profound and Ugric, monotonous and mystical. How did that evening end? I hardly remember. I left with birdsong and Estonian music in my mind, regretful of the vodka, legs so tired. The next day I woke up burnt by the sun, legs aching. I could barely even open my eyes.
A few days earlier I had driven to the old churchyard in Sutlepa with Herbert Stahl, a Swede from one of the islands. He was nineteen when they were evacuated, following the Soviet invasion. “No damn joke, that,” he told me, lifting his black sunglasses. He had been back to the island, which was still heavily mined, and applied to get his land back. There was nothing left of any of the houses or buildings, he said. They were razed to the ground by the Red Army. We wandered about and talked, and he kept straying from the subject to tell me other things about his life, like the time when he was clinically dead from accidental electrocution and woke up in hospital: “I was dead, see, and then I woke up in a soft bed, surrounded by people in white, and I thought, Is this heaven?” He was a fridge repairman, and when Estonia became independent he went to Electrolux, the company he worked for, and told them about his accident and asked for money for the trip over. His manager asked how much he needed, and handed over 3,000 Swedish crowns, some £300, in cash, there and then.
He did tell me a few things about life on the island, mostly in the bar later, stray facts of little use to my research. Marriages, he said, were informally arranged, and with only sixty-seven families there was a lot of intermarriage. Girls knitted competitively. In the end he talked only about his present girlfriends in Estonia, all, he said, wild about him. “I never dare to joke to anyone anymore about marriage,” he said smugly, “they take it so seriously.” He was so rich, in that context, this retired fridge repairman. I reminded him that we had promised to go up to Ivar’s, and he bought a bottle of cherry liqueur to give him. Slightly drunk by now, he flirted heavily with me, to Ivar’s obvious amusement. Just as I was leaving he telepathically stood up at the same time, so we had to leave together. He hugged me rather forcefully as I offered him a hand in good night.
After Herbert, another Swede turned up in the village: Tor, a libertarian entrepreneur from Åtvidaberg. He was thinking of leaving Sweden for good and settling here, starting a small firm. He was ex-army, small and heavy, with dark blue, almond-shaped eyes. He, also, talked about all the women he’d met, most of them mothers, all of them poor.
I never quite saw that kind of poverty in the village. The same day I met Tor, I went to post a letter. Ülo’s mother had taken charge of the post office whilst Eve was on holiday. She was sitting on a chair behind the counter having her hair cut by a friend. Another friend was watching and talking. They interrupted proceedings to sell me a stamp for England.
“It’s two-ninety,” she said.
“Isn’t it four, actually?” I asked hesitantly, knowing the price by heart.
“No! Two-ninety.”
> I looked at her, then paid 2.90, put the stamp on the envelope, and handed it back to her, hoping for the best. They were poor too, but it was such a peaceful scene. The absence of the state also meant the absence of rules, so the old alcoholics could sit and drink in the shop, without being harrassed. The mayor’s mother could stand in, and have her hair cut whilst working. It was so humane.
ELEVEN
Swirls of Dust
In June there was a festival for the Estonian Swedes, organised from Sweden, with many former refugees attending. Everything was delayed, of course—people were rigging up a TV and video in front of the stage, and there was a murmur of voices. Virve, the Finnish guardian of Swedishness, told me, incensed, “Do you know what I heard when I arrived? An English song!” The exhibition, in the narrow room behind the hall, showed the history of the Estonian Swedes, and people were milling about looking at the display. I looked up, and saw Ivar with an elderly Swedish woman. She had just given him a Swedish aspirin and a throat lozenge. I saw him leave her, to discreetly spit out the lozenge, which he didn’t like. She saw me, and muttered quickly to her daughter, “Do you have any more of those aspirins?” She, the daughter, fished out a whole packet, and gave it to me. “They are over the counter,” the mother explained carefully, in Swedish, “not on prescription.” “Thank you,” I said, trying not to sound too Swedish. She nodded and smiled, gripped my hand, and shook out a handful of medicinal chewing gum, a Swedish speciality, from a box as a gift. I knew that chewing gum, and was happy to have it.
Everything is Wonderful Page 18