Everything is Wonderful

by Sigrid Rausing

  In late July I went to film Ruth. She was dressed up, and read, dramatically, from her latest notebook, standing on the steps of her cottage. It was very windy, and the sun was glaring, so after a while I suggested that we go inside. For the first time she took me up to the first floor of her cottage. There were two small rooms there, with old iron bedsteads, some old tools, and old postcards covering the yellowing wallpaper on the bulging walls. This was her museum to the Ölvingssons, the Swedish missionary family, who escaped in 1944—a museum no one ever saw, where no one ever went, but a museum nevertheless. She told me how Maria Ölvingsson, née Sedman, had hidden her husband in a hole in the ground, under an unhinged old door covered with earth, and even a small tree. She would sing him warnings in Swedish as the Russian soldiers came looking for him. He evaded deportation, and they escaped.

  That same night I went for a walk at sunset, slowly, past the storks picking on the fields, a sparrow hawk chasing a small bird. It threw itself backwards and forwards so quickly that the hawk missed it, and suddenly veered away, flying low over the fields. I walked back on the road, passed by little Ladas and Skodas, families. The men waved, the women stared straight ahead. A Mitsubishi from Finland, a rare sight, passed me, and the driver waved, thinking me a local, I supposed. It was high summer. I didn’t have much time left.

  At the end of July Virve was going back to Helsinki. The heatwave had lasted for weeks already, and I invited her over for a last cold drink before she left. She sat at my kitchen table drinking peach juice, looking at me with her inscrutable brown eyes. This had been her last year on the collective farm. After several years of teaching there, she was going back to Finland for good.

  Later I went over to the Swedish charity sale in the culture hall. There were lots of cars outside, and a queue of maybe seventy people when I came, mostly from the village, but a few I didn’t recognise, who had come in from the mainland. I joined the queue, but some of my friends ushered me ahead. “Here comes the press!” they shouted, laughing, insisting I go straight in. The Swedish organisers only let in about ten people at a time, every twenty minutes or so. I wandered about amongst the fridges and piles of shoes and T-shirts and baby clothes. The customers walked around in silence, looking at it all.

  Earlier I had spent several hours working in Ivar’s library. He had made new potatoes and tomato and onion salad with sour cream, with tinned fatty pork, for me, talking with enthusiasm about a popularity diagram he had drawn for his class. He showed me the diagram, showing who was most and least popular in his class. He was planning to show it to them as an example of Western “sociological method.” The lines were colour coded and simple to understand. One girl had not a single line showing that other people liked her drawn to her name, and it seemed not to occur to Ivar that this was problematic. The tools for understanding society were coming back, but it was a piecemeal process, untempered, as yet, by social criticism.

  That evening Tor, the Swedish entrepreneur, came to pick me up for a shashlik at the bar by the harbour. “Everybody who speaks Swedish is there,” he said cosily, “so I was sent to fetch you.” I drank too many vodka tonics on that mosquito-ridden evening, watching the dancing, sitting mainly with Marika, the vet. At about three in the morning Marika drove us all home, unsteadily. As soon as we arrived I realised I had left my bag behind, and we drove back, all of us, through the white night, on the small road meandering through the fields, listening to the first birds. We had Sprite and coffee before finally walking home. The stars were fading by then, and the scent of the hay drifted up with the mist on the fields.

  In July I visited Narva, the largest city of east Estonia, with Tor. Narva was then almost entirely Russian, and we were to meet a Russian couple who wanted to start a Swedish society there. We arrived in the early evening, driving past old people chatting on comfortable benches outside postwar apartment buildings. The streets were wide and empty. We found our modest hotel, and, armed with only an address, set off to find the Russians. They, Vladik and Marika, were not at home, so we had dinner in a restaurant instead. A cat lazily stretched out on the carpet, and a mangy dog trotted past a few times. There was an orchestra of grey-faced old men, and an elderly waitress with bleached hair. We ate meat salad, and a dry piece of meat with potatoes, and drank tea with sugar melting in the bottom of the glass. We moved twice to avoid the orchestra, the musicians shrugging at me regretfully.

  After dinner we returned to the house of the Russians, and this time Vladik, who turned out to be Georgian, opened the door. We waited with his seven-year-old daughter whilst he left to get Marika, his Russian wife. The girl bravely did her best to entertain us, showing us her toys, teaching Tor Russian words, and switching the channels on the old television. After nearly forty minutes her parents returned, and moved immediately into the kitchen to prepare dinner. They stayed there, again, for nearly forty minutes, whilst their daughter continued staunchly to entertain us. It was like being in an experimental film from the 1960s, where the waiting is the substance, and the point. Finally they brought out a festive meal: sausages and mashed potatoes, salads and pickles, a small plate of raspberries and another plate of yogurt and Western chocolates, red lemonade and the Swedish bottle of Absolut vodka that Tor had brought as a present.

  We talked about the Swedish friendship organisation they had started, in German, which Vladik barely spoke, Marika and I mixed with Estonian, and Tor spoke passably. They had read a lot about the Swedish connection in the newspapers, they said. They already had fifty-eight members. The key member, they said, was a Swede called Blomfelt, born in 1907, whose parents had immigrated to Russia at the time of the revolution, and who now lived in Narva. Blomfelt was, they confessed when we pressed the point, the only Swedish member. We couldn’t meet him, because he was in St. Petersburg. By the end, after a political discussion, where they maintained that the laws were bad, especially the Estonian language requirements for citizenship, but that they loved all people—Estonians, too—whilst Tor stubbornly, and slightly tipsily, maintained that the situation was “not only a problem but also an opportunity,” they suddenly asked, intently, if it was possible for them to buy a washing machine in Sweden for dollars.

  The next day they took us to the great Kreenholm textile factory. In its heyday it had had twelve thousand employees. Now three thousand people worked there. Tor, an opportunistic entrepreneur, wanted to order fabric. We were taken to a boardroom, where a sceptical blond young man received us. Tor discussed the order, somewhat tensely—he had left his business cards in the car, he claimed—whilst Vladik and Marika rang various numbers from the telephone in a corner of the room. We continued to a furniture factory, where he confidently ordered a thousand drawers. I sank into a chair, still weak from the night before.

  After lunch we drove to the beach to rest. I wanted to swim, but Vladik told me that the water was dangerous, toxic with algae blooms. “She is used to it,” he said, nodding to his young daughter, who was splashing and frolicking in the water. Tor was stretched out on the sand like a sea lion next to Marika, to whom he had taken a liking. I didn’t swim, and contemplated instead what fates had taken me to this place, to Tor, and to this couple who were faking a Swedish connection to create a slightly wider stage for themselves in the narrow niche of post-Soviet capitalism. Tor was a libertarian, and knew, of course, that they weren’t Swedish, but liked them all the better for it.

  Tor had kept bees in Sweden. On the way home from Narva he told me about sitting between two beehives, taking pollen notes, checking the colour of the pollen against a chart, and occasionally catching an irritated and swollen bee to examine it. The sun was shining, the bees were humming, and he felt absolutely at peace. As he told the story, we were approaching Kunda, the old cement factory town. I think at that point the old factory might still have been working—just. The streets, cars, and houses were covered in white cement dust, like snow. We got out of the car to get a better look. It
was an ecological disaster: silent, empty, and tragic. No bees could survive there.

  In early August the grey geese came back from the north. The storks had already left. One evening I walked all the way to Paslepa manor, the former Russian base; a strange, humid evening, with a grey haze over the sun and fields, and clouds of silent mosquitos attacking my legs. The whole summer I had been plagued by the flies on the collective farm. I had arrived too late in the season the previous year to have seen much of them, other than the dead flies in the corridor of the “hotel.” By May they were back, numerous, fearless and aggressive. They flew straight into your face to get at the eyes. I had never seen European flies behave like that—our flies, I now think, must be weakened by insecticides, and starved by efficient sanitation and rubbish disposal.

  That same day I had happened to be at the shop when the food deliveries arrived in the middle of the morning. Five women—customers—were waiting, whilst the supplies were carried in by a couple helped by two small children: crates of beer, lemonade, bread, sausage, boxes of things. We waited together for forty-five minutes whilst the shopkeeper meticulously rearranged all the goods. A large woman in front of me was running her fingers through the hair of her ten-year-old boy; there was no sense of impatience. Later a few young strangers with name badges sauntered through the village, probably here on the Swedish language course. They seemed rather glamorous. I found myself, to my shame, staring at them like a local.

  That evening I found Marika and Alar and Heli drinking cocktails: 96 percent ethanol from Marika’s veterinary practise poured into a Russian vodka bottle, mixed with “exotic juice”. They used to drink ethanol eggnogs because Marika got paid in eggs from the farmers; thirty to forty eggs to cure a sick cow. When the salmonella started appearing in the eggs they stopped it, and started mixing the alcohol with juice. I drank that strange and ravaging mixture with them, and at midnight we went to the bar by the harbour, open all night now for drinking and dancing. Somebody, I think it was Ets, bought a bottle of Georgian champagne, and we drank that, too. Some strangers turned up—a pale man with green eyes and a sandy moustache, and a young couple with a Doberman. They were from President Meri’s staff—he had a dacha on the peninsula, from the Soviet era. I had come across it by chance—a seemingly abandoned narrow dirt road broadened, then turned into an asphalt road, ending by a high gate and a fence. People were dancing wild Estonian waltzes and polkas; under the influence of ethanol and Georgian champagne, the strangers seemed like friends. Dusk merged with dawn, and I walked home, alone.

  A few days before this I had gone sailing with Ets and some other people—he owned, I was surprised to learn, a sailing boat. In the middle of the night we anchored outside a small island, and rowed to land. There was a hostel, with old rooms lined in pine, and a bar lit by candles. There was no electricity. A young man came in, tall, willowy, and completely naked. We sat by a rough wooden table, drinking Russian vodka and eating salted cucumber and pickled mushrooms. A woman with long black hair was sleeping on a bench. The candle on our table flickered in the night breeze. The naked young man sat opposite us by the bar, one knee drawn up under his chin, a thin face, with a wispy blond beard. I watched him like a being from another world.

  Ets talked about Sweden, and about drinking Swedish coffee on his first visit there, in 1989. The coffee was so strong, he said, that for the first night he didn’t sleep at all, his heart racing. I felt unexpectedly tender towards him at the thought of the clean sharp reality of a Swedish bed, his heart racing late at night from the strong Swedish coffee. I wondered what it was like—everything here was so well used compared to Sweden. You lived lightly on it. I wondered, but didn’t ask, if he was frightened. “Did you like it?” I asked, finally, and he looked at me, eyes very blue in his tanned face, and said, “Yes, of course,” with a quiet kind of emphasis, as if it would be impossible not to like something so rich and clean and beautiful.

  “Tell me about London,” he said then. “Tell me anything.” I told him how you have to drive for hours to get through it, how hot and humid it is in the summer, how you then notice how international London is, how you move quickly through the streets.

  We, too, slept on the benches that night, woken by the hostel keeper early the next morning. It was so hot. We swam from the boat, and for a long time I stayed in the water, towed on a rope through the dirty, brackish Baltic Sea.

  Who was I at this point, for them? A kind of mascot, perhaps. In the plenty of Estonian summer I was offered strawberries, gooseberries, rides in Ladas. Once I was offered fish, two tiny brown fish. I was always offered drinks, too many drinks. A slight anxiety was setting in about leaving. At the same time the heat, the relentless heatwave made me feel that nothing would ever change. The glaring light was eating me up, and I longed for grey clouds and cool winds. Something felt stuck in my throat. I slept and slept. My Swedish duvet, so warm in the winter, smelled of sweat now. There was no wind—the village echoed without the perennial wind. The dogs howled. I woke up at night from the howling, or from Karl crying next door. The moths fluttered in the kitchen as I stumbled out for a glass of water. I dreamt, anxiously, about leaving my laptop behind.

  One day, while taking notes from some of Ivar’s files, I heard a scratching at the door, and the softest knock imaginable. It was Ruth, of course, with that carefulness that made her talk always in a whisper and knock so softly, so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear. She brought me a finished notebook, her new tract of writing. She also brought me some flowers—small, chubby blue-and-white cushions threaded on a stem. I suspected they might be rare. On one of them a baby snail sat absolutely still, almost transparent, with a hint of something darker deep inside its body, and the beginnings of a shell on its back. I thought of Katarina, and a walk where we had studied the snails on the road, discussing baby snails, origins and appearance—do snails give live birth like whales, or do they lay eggs?

  The moment of leaving was drawing near. I anticipated some emotion—perhaps tears, mingled with embarrassment. The prospect of leaving—how to say goodbye—unnerved me, and at the same time I thought a lot about the moment of sitting in the car, self-contained, on my way to Tallinn; freedom, and the end.

  I first said goodbye to Ruth. I went into her mosquito-ridden garden. Knocking on her door, I suddenly saw her outside, completely naked with a bucket of water—she was washing. She saw me, and came dancing up, still naked. “It’s so hot, so hot,” she said, ushering me in to wait for her. Eventually she came in herself in a thin cotton dress. We talked a little, and she sang and prayed for me.

  I went on to Ivar. He, too, was practically naked, wearing only some worn-out red-and-white cotton underwear. I don’t think he minded that. We said the usual things about keeping in touch, and so on, but I somehow felt we wouldn’t. It was so hot. We didn’t shake hands.

  Alar carried all my things down to the car. I’d already given him and Heli what I wasn’t taking. I hugged him, and Heli, and Karl. They gave me a bottle of the 96 percent ethanol to remember them by, a characteristically complex and ironic present. Some men were working on a car in front of the block opposite, including Toivo, the gamekeeper. I waved at him. I was sitting in the car when Ets suddenly walked by. I got out, ignored his outstretched hand, kissed him on the cheek, got in the car, and left. I drove around the building, and looked back. Ets had drifted over to the men by the car. I waved, and just then he turned around and waved, too. I don’t know why I kissed him—perhaps I had already left the village culture at the moment of leaving, and come back to myself.

  In Tallinn, Veevi was in a blue-and-white-striped house coat. “Look what I have on underneath,” she said, hitching it up to show that she, too, was naked. The heat was intense. She made me take a cold shower before lunch, and another one before we left for the harbour, which was blissful. We had a final conversation about her old house. She had sold it by now, but there were other difficulties. She had
taken the money out of the country, to Finland, and there were unspecified and unforeseen “complications” at the bank.

  She came with me to the harbour. We lost our way, just like my initial visit when she came with me to the airport. Then we found it. I put my car in the queue for the ferry, we said goodbye, and she left. I was sitting in the car waiting, when suddenly a figure loomed, knocking loudly on the window. I jumped and screamed, but it was her, of course. I can’t remember why she came back. It must have been some last thing she wanted me to know. Then I sat in the car, self-contained, irrevocably leaving. I put on some lipstick. A man in a green Mercedes next to me was drinking a beer.

  That day, on a field near Tallinn, I had seen a large grey dog, like an Alsatian but slightly bigger, with dark-tipped ears, looking like a wolf. Perhaps it was a wolf. On the overnight ferry to Stockholm I dreamt about wolves, a whole pack of them, on that same field, beautiful, and slightly frightening.

  And that was it. From Stockholm I went straight to Vienna to see my sister and her husband. I stayed with them at the Hotel Sacher. Thus the morning after leaving the collective farm I was lying in bed, propped up by an impossibly soft bolster and large cushions, a cup of strong coffee with hot milk on the table next to me. A chandelier was hanging from the ornate ceiling, and the pale blue-and-gold silk curtains matched the blue-and-gold wallpaper. Next to my coffee was a tiny little Sachertorte wrapped in gold foil. The contrast with the collective farm was surreal.

  We went, that day, on a tour of the Kunstmuseum to see the newly restored Dürer altarpiece. We saw large Tintorettos on burgundy cloth, Brueghels and Brueghel copyists. The smell of paint was lovely. It was so hot still. A woman copyist had taken off her shoes, painting barefoot in that splendid room.

  In the evening, going back to the hotel in a taxi, the driver playing loud romantic music, streetlights flickering by, I was filled with a new sense of potential, of leisure and luxury. I was also still floating in an in-between world, losing the primary purpose that had kept me on the collective farm for a year. Having kept a diary for a year, I could now no longer write—everything I wrote seemed contrived and inauthentic. And having worried so much about losing my laptop, I very nearly walked away from it at the airport in Stockholm. A kind stranger alerted me to the padded bag on the trolley, after I had taken several steps away from it. He smiled and shook his head at me, not knowing, of course, that a year’s work, and the PhD and book to come, was in that laptop.