I handed him my pen.
‘Yes, yes, quicker that way . . .’ he said.
His hands were shaking as he took the pen.
He had suffered a terrible shock, it seemed. He had been rattling around this empty mansion, enjoying the silence, and then there had been a terrible hammering on the doors, the sound of the bell tolling through the corridors. He was still slightly startled; he eyed me with suspicion.
‘Nationality?’
‘Occupation?’
The answer made him jiggle the pen around.
‘What do you write?’
‘Reason for visit?’
‘How did you hear about the place?’
I told him why I was in Estonia, and he had a brief nervous collapse. He tried to hide it, but he was sweating when he lifted his face again and his hands were knocking on the desk.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘You have been speaking to our first president?’
After that everything changed and he practically bowed me into the billiard room.
It was all beautiful and empty and slightly absurd. The billiard room was set up for a rainy afternoon, for visitors who enjoyed languid games while they smoked elegantly, stubbing the cigarettes into ornate ashtrays. There was a bar for cocktails, prepared for these affable legions of vanished gentlemen. In the drawing room everything was green—the ceilings were painted into luscious spirals; the tables stood on finely curved legs. Everything was abundant, defying the dour streets outside. It was like a set for an Evelyn Waugh novel, a perfect backdrop for decadent aristo-bohemia, slurred vowels over tea, indolent intrigues to the slow winding of the gramophone. Villa Ammende had been empty for years before it was restored into a hotel. I stayed a night, the only guest, eating alone in an echoing dining room designed in recovered opulence, opulence fanning itself, still remembering its nightmarish swoon, the years as a Soviet lunatic asylum, or prison, or training centre—the decadent corridors filled with the terseness of officialese. When a waiter came along the corridor, the footsteps echoed around the high ceilings. The bored concierge put me in the most lavish suite—perhaps in the name of Meri—a three-roomed luxury complex, with a sauna, a bedroom with engraved cupboards, art nouveau murals, and a living room with ornate oak shelves, full of German classics: Goethe, Thomas Mann, the Brothers Grimm.
It was beautiful, but there was an air of suspense to the rooms, as if Ammende had just gone off to the beach with a group of friends recently arrived from Vilnius, and would be returning for tea. Any moment, I thought, wandering through the empty corridors, disconcerted by the silence, a whole pile of aristo-Balts would appear—raffish, slightly tired after an energetic walk—and demand cocktails and ices. Any moment the gramophone would wind into action and a few women in furs would emerge to tap their fingers on the curved arms of the chairs. In the empty corridors, I kept turning around, expecting to find someone there with their hand outstretched, saying how do you do. There was no one there, just the glass eyes of a stuffed bear, peering from a balustrade.
This was the opulence which fled with the Balts. The Estonians never knew much about the champagne flutes and the delicate curved feet of the chairs in Villa Ammende. They said they were simple people, surviving through generations because of their affinity with the trees, their love for the swamp plains. It was a national story, a fable they told themselves, but they had been labourers for generations, living on farms, deprived of any access to wealth. Meri had been talking about it, the knowledge of the land, the attraction to simple things. It made them despise the Soviet system, he had said, because it polluted and exploited and never considered the corrosive effects of engine fuel or nuclear reactors on the countryside. There were Estonians who hid in the forests; some of them formed resistance groups, living for years out of society, away from Soviet repression.
It was a deep historical feeling, a memory of the stones, Lennart had said. Cleaning it up, cleaning up the wrecks of Soviet ships sunk in the harbours, the polluted lands, coated with fuel, the nuclear debris, the wreckage of the collective farms, meant a lot to the Estonians. They tried to clean away the past, the years of brown and grey, the suspense and dullness, the compromises they made, the collusion with the Soviets which allowed some to prosper. They tried to clean up the guilt, the regret, the ambivalence.
I slept strangely in Villa Ammende, waking to see the sun bright on the lawn, where aristo-Balts should already have been walking, perambulating under parasols. The house was silent as I walked down for breakfast. A waitress poured coffee, and the clinking of the spoon as I swirled in the milk echoed through the room.
When I left, the lonely man on the desk waved me down the steps. ‘Come again,’ he said. ‘During the high season, we are very full. But other times of year, like now for example, you only need to give us a few days’ notice.’ I wondered if most of the time he and the waitress lived it up in Villa Ammende, twirling around the sitting room to music from the gramophone, leafing through the library of German classics, patting the stuffed lion on the head. The bacchanalia only stopped when the bell tolled through the corridors; then they put on their uniforms and became solemn and monosyllabic. As I drove off I imagined the man on the desk whipping off his grey suit and donning a red velvet smoking jacket, slinking into the billiard room to pot a few balls, before his first whisky of the day.
In southern Estonia, I took the ferry across the sea to Saaremaa, the tree-covered island where the meteorite fell. Under a cold sky, the ship crossed the sea, and the sky was full of seabirds circling the wake. I drove out into more forests, fine empty forests, along a road without cars which snaked through the island. There was a thick mist falling across Saaremaa; the road slipped away into whiteness. I missed the turn to the meteorite site, and drove on towards a small town, called Kuressaare, where the mist was still thicker. I could see a few houses, and a castle at the end of the street with what appeared to be a drawbridge. There was a health spa on the shore, full of people in towelling robes, where I tried to ask for directions, but the atmosphere was so cranky and medicinal that I left without finding anyone to ask. The mist lingered along the coast, rolling off the pale sea. I stepped into a bar and asked for directions from a pale blond man who was sitting at a table. He pointed me back along the road.
‘If I said tuli to you, what would I mean?’ I asked.
He was nonchalant and friendly. He considered the question thoughtfully, as if people often came to the bar asking him to define random Estonian words.
‘You would mean “fire,” ’ he said.
The second time the mist had cleared and I saw the sign to the meteorite site pointing off the road, towards a patch of woodland. The land was completely flat, until a sudden hill, which swept the forest up at a sharp angle. I walked up the rise, and at the top I could see that the hill was part of the circular ridge of a hole. It was the hole gouged out by a burning rock, when it crashed into the flat soil of Saaremaa. The circumference was impressive, and a lake had formed in the crater. The brown water of the lake reflected the trees, which clung on to the hillsides, hunched towards the lake as if they were sliding slowly down the slope into the water. Everything was focused on the large crater hole. The forest was silent and the mist swept around the sides of the crater, sidling along the branches of the trees. I was blanched out of the meteorite hole, as the mist obscured the view across the waters.
In the Kalevala, there was a story about the ‘fire from Heaven.’ The Old Man of the sky sent fire to the earth, splitting the heavens, spilling a spark of fire through the clouds. Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen decided to go and find out what the fire was that they had seen. The spark had fallen from the sky, piercing the clouds, and the flame had whirled through lands and swamps, until it plunged into the waters of a lake in Finland. The lake nearly caught fire, and the waters were flushed red from the flame. Three times in a night the lake foamed as high as the spruce trees around its banks, roaring to its brim from the force of the fire, leaving the fish stranded
on the shore. At the time, the queen of the north had stolen the sun, so the hero-gods decided to fish for the fire. Settling themselves on a patch of unscorched land, they unravelled a twine into the water and brought up the fire, but the fire escaped, singed Väinämöinen’s beard, and disappeared into the distance, setting the juniper heath alight, burning up the spruce glades, and burning half of the north.
A blast with the force of an atomic explosion, Meri said. It must have had a profound effect on the tribes that saw it—a blazing sun falling to the earth, suddenly, without any noise, then a great explosion and a raging fire in the forest, a cloud of dust darkening the sky. The president thought that Thule had been a thing, not a place. Thule was a rare and terrifying event in the history of the Baltic region. It had been the fire which burned in the east, Thule the flame. The ancient Germanic tribes, reeling from the shock of seeing the sun falling to the earth, understood that even the gods could die. The locals, living in the marshes on Saaremaa, muttered through generations about a Great Fire. It was a story in their land, but it came from a particular place, and they offered to show Pytheas where it had happened. They showed him where the sun fell from the sky, but when Pytheas’s account of his journey disappeared, and Pytheas’s story was made and remade from leftover fragments, later writers thought he had meant the setting of the sun in the land of Thule.
The meteorite fell on the land, and thousands of years later Meri felt it added a layer of irony to Nazi destruction, that the Nazis were desecrating the basis of their myths, the event that spawned the idea of Götterdämmerung. This is where it came from, Meri had said, and in this way Thule was a story about the origins of the German people, though it was far from the ‘Aryan’ utopia the Nazis had imagined. It was a story of an original trauma, an original terror, which changed the way these early tribes saw the world. All of this was impossible to prove, impossible to justify except as an elaborate fantasy, but Meri’s idea worked as well as Nansen’s idea about Thule, or Burton’s. Meri’s Thule was as much of a patchwork of fragments and imaginative reconstruction. Meri wanted the word Thule for his nation, and for Meri, Thule was a purgatorial fire, sweeping across the land. It made Thule less a dream of an ideal place and more an event beyond the control of humans, beyond the understanding of early tribes. The witnesses of this fiery Thule were the shocked locals, staggering from their fields and marshes, seeing the fire blazing into the earth, burning for days, the clouds of ash blackening the sky.
And as I left Estonia I thought of the ancient philosophers of Thule, gathering their sources, batting the story from nation to nation. Thule had been a mystery, an expression of curiosity about the indeterminate edges of the world, part of the urge to complete the map. But the story had long been entwined with power and conquest; Caesar saw the conquest of the last land as a triumph for his empire, Virgil imagined Augustus lord of all the lands, even as far as Thule. Meri had tried to lift Thule out of the scrabbling sets of hands, by suggesting that Thule was something beyond the human world. He saw Thule as a story about the power of nature itself, the force of celestial objects, the terrible energy of fire. One Thule might be swamped by unwanted visitors. Another Thule might be smashed and burned. Another Thule might be destroyed by the Nazis, then by the Russians. Meri had asked for the story back, as if it were a piece of national memory, a national dream, forgotten during the occupation.
ICE HEART
NORTH! NORTH INTO THE WHIRLWIND! NORTH TO THE MOCKING GALE!
TOWARD THE LASH OF THE DRIVEN SNOWFLAKES WHERE THE SCOURGED
SEA-DOGS QUAIL!
SAW HE NO RUBY TOWERS? LONGED NOT FOR SOFTER LAND?
AYE! BUT A TENSER POWER GRIPPED AND DIRECTED HIS HAND!
BUT RATHER TO GO WHERE OTHERS HAVE NOT, TO CONQUER WHERE ALL
HAVE LOST,
TO BATTLE THE FRENZIED HURRICANE WHILE HOPE IS A NAKED GHOST.
SUCH IS THE POWER THAT DRIVES HIM INTO THE TORTURING GALE; THIS IS THE RUGGED GOAL, THIS THE DESIRED GRAIL!
“ULTIMA THULE,” THOMAS CALDECOT CHUBB (1899-1972)
It had been a conversation running through thousands of years. There were key players, more strident voices—the classical writers, setting the scene, Strabo writing irritable prose, because he never really believed in Thule anyway, Virgil and Pliny, Geminus of Rhodes and Pomponius Mela, and Tacitus speculating about Agricola, and Ptolemy finding a place for Thule on his map of the world. There were studious kings and clerics writing up the latest findings on the north, from Alfred the Great to Bede to Adam of Bremen, mingling them with classical stories. There were Vikings, ploughing across the oceans, Ottar the Viking, Erik the Red—burly men, covered in scars. There was Petrarch wondering where Thule might be. There were the Spanish and Portuguese explorers finding new worlds and carrying Seneca in their packs. There was Burton, insistent that Iceland was so very obviously Thule, agreeing with Columbus who had sailed up to Iceland and called it Thule. There was Nansen immaculate in spurs, talking about Norway and Thule. Now, there was Lennart Meri in his small country, crafting an ancient past for his nation.
The earlier writers marked out a time when vast plains stretched into darkness, and the sea was an intimation of ancient emptiness, and everything that lay beyond the circle of familiar experience was a playground for all the fabled beings of mythology. Later, others watched the calm and sober lines of the northern landscape appearing, new stories from the north revealing forests and great rivers, ice floes drifting on an empty sea, and the mists curling at the base of ancient slabs of stone. For a time, a simple answer was enough, the simple selection of a country: Iceland, Norway, or Britain. There were agonistic arguments, between self-appointed experts, determined to end the debate. There were parodies, there was Pope grouching about flaccid verse, like the dank offerings of Thule, there was Goethe making fairytales from it, Shelley, Godwin, Poe, all throwing it in for a piece of scene-setting or mere atmosphere.
Sustained talk of silent spaces, the expression of a sense of fascination for snow-bound plains, light falling across ice crystals, forming a rainbow of colours, and a sense of the strangeness of long twilight days, the swart nights, and those moments when the longing for home called like a clarion cry across the ice. There had been a terrible pause, when the conversation had been taken over by brutal rhetoric, but gradually the voices had sounded again. Tentatively at first, growing more confident.
In my mind there was a blank spot, a vast white patch, the most northerly island. I turned to the ice mountains of Greenland. Seeking to draw the strains together, I turned to a forbidding ice-plain, at the edge of the maps, spreading towards the frozen ocean. Greenland had nothing to do with the original idea of Thule. Pytheas could hardly have sailed so far. In all the learned expositions, all the mutterings of clerics and geographers, no one had ever seriously claimed that Greenland was Thule. The ancient ice field had nothing to do with the argument across millennia, with all the writers and explorers and adventurers proposing their theories. But it had everything to do with the twentieth century, and with the recent history of Thule. It had everything to do with the post-war world that Meri had described, though it was still remote, still a distant and almost inaccessible place.
It was a question of modern cartography: on the global map, there are two places called Thule, both twentieth-century creations. In 1910 a Danish explorer called Knud Rasmussen set up a trading post in the far north of Greenland and called it Thule. He named the local people the Thule Inuit and set out to study their traditions in a series of Thule Expeditions. Rasmussen used Thule to define the barren wilderness he called home—a place both remote and domestic to him, a place where he was an outsider, but where the local people tolerated him because he spoke to them in their language, and sold them guns. Rasmussen pinned the word Thule to the whiteness of Greenland, the most northerly land, the largest island in the world, a land stretching as far as the frozen ice around the North Pole.
Thule, a distant place, a settlement at the edge of the wor
ld, turned out to be in the middle of the Cold War. In the 1950s, the US Military found that Thule was equidistant between New York and Moscow, as the bomber flies. They built an air base there, and called it Thule. They moved the local Inuit population away to another Thule, a new settlement further north. Thule became a Cold War outpost, at 76° N. Thule Air Base was a staging post for nuclear bombers during the Cold War. It was part of a general trend—it was during the Cold War that the Arctic ice became so useful to the US and the USSR as a great blank hiding place for nuclear submarines, nuclear missiles and nuclear waste; a site for frigid operations, scattered with secret outposts. The frozen ocean around the North Pole became a no-man’s-land. The vast ice-heart of Greenland lay at the centre, between hostile nations.
I flew back from Tallinn to London, and took to phoning around, trying to find a way to the ice island. I sat in the flat in London and stared at the Westway, at the fleets of cars waiting patiently to move forward. As I prepared to travel again, Greenland was no longer a frost virgin waiting for violating footsteps, but it was still covered in a thick and ancient mound of ice, ice so heavy it had crushed the land, forcing it down into the sea. The inhabitants—there were barely sixty thousand—lived along the coasts, in the few ice-free regions. Greenland was an immense ice-plain, and the thought of it fascinated me as a monstrous and indefinable shape might fascinate a child, innocently unaware of the terror it represented.
The Ice Museum Page 24