by Adam Thorpe
I sucked on my third cigarillo and watched a duck dip its head again and again, shaking it dry each time, ignorant of the change of regimes, of the cruelty of men. One was master of one’s own destiny. I ran another little film through my head, like a trailer. I order a coffee, I remark on her English, we get chatting. Then what? Invite her for a drink? A meal? Talk music? Violins? Tell her all about Handel?
I shook my head clear of it all. This type of fantasy had to be a way of keeping going.
This particular fantasy would nourish my work. I’d keep my life stable and smooth, loving Milly and however many children we were destined to have. I picked a shred of tobacco off my tongue. I felt good. Well, better.
Jesus, we had to have children. I was playing with my knob through my pocket, without meaning to. I’d go back from here brimming with spunk. It was all psychology and not being anxious. We’d romp home.
On the way back to my apartment, I smelt burning. The air was misted where the sun fell between the buildings. I felt it in my throat, overriding the tobacco-burn, nastily chemical.
I turned the corner and there, in the middle of the street, stood a large filing cabinet. It was on fire. It was pouring out thick, brown smoke from its half-open drawers. The top half of the cabinet was already burned black and charred files dangled from the drawers or lay scattered on the cobbles. A man was spraying water at it through a shower-head on the end of a tube that snaked back through a window into a small office. He was chatting to interested passers-by, who seemed unaffected by the smoke, as if this happened every day.
It was a mystery, but I didn’t feel like asking questions: my throat was already vulnerable from the cigarillos and the nip in the air.
So I chose a different route back.
I swung wide up Rataskaevu and then decided to stretch my legs further to clean out my lungs. I found myself taking a narrow alley I didn’t know, by the eastern side of the old wall. It twisted a little, smelling of cats, and finally emerged into a cobbled street that looked strange for a few moments until I saw the sign that said Café Majolica. Then the street’s elements fell into familiarity like the crystals in my toy kaleidoscope.
This did not hold together. I’d wanted to avoid this. I’d thought I was higher up, nearer St Olav’s Church. I did not have the Knowledge for this city. In fact, the old centre of Tallinn was very small, and it was shrinking further as I became familiar with it.
My heart thumped in my ears, but not from the exercise. I knew, somehow, as I pushed the café’s loose handle down (it was a nicely old-fashioned French-style door), that I was doing the wrong thing, taking the wrong turn. But it excited me too because at some level it was a recognition that I was freer than I’d ever realised.
Not that I’d ever thought I wasn’t free. Being married hadn’t changed much, in that sense, even though I’d tied the knot in one of the oldest churches in England, with a Saxon nave and a Roman yew in the graveyard. The wedding, being a du Crane wedding, was – what’s the word – embalmed in wealth: there were five hundred guests, among them the cream of the music world, the cream of the English landed gentry, and the cream of the City. One man there, pointed out to me by the bride’s mother (dear old Marjorie), had broken through the £3-million-a-year barrier, minus bonus. He looked very happy on it in his morning suit.
‘His nose is ill-judged,’ said Marjorie, already woozy.
My parents seemed to crouch through the whole thing, dazzled and dismayed at the sound of their own voices. Then my mum got sozzled and started to enjoy herself, much to the embarrassment of the groom; because my mum was blind (really blind, not blind drunk), I had to make sure she was chaperoned, especially around the ponds.
If it had been sunny, the day would have outshone any previous known wedding ever (in everyone’s opinion), but it was a sultry, wall-to-wall grey under a blank sky; this kept a lid on things, filling the air with little flies that got into everything, including the guests. The grounds, with their sweeping lawns and copper beeches leading up to the grey-stoned Hall itself, made everyone look like spivs. The rain held off, at least – although one hysterical woman in a hat like a flying saucer was sure she felt a big drop on her cheek on emerging from the main marquee, and the sky was scanned by everyone nearby.
‘Junkers 88 at five o’clock!’ someone shouted. It was not me.
Because the lawns sloped, several pot-bellied invitees fell over and actually rolled, although they picked themselves up and laughed each time. I saw this myself. I was not drunk.
To my surprise, only one of the five hundred died that day: this was a twenty-year-old relative who followed the wedding in Hampshire with a night’s clubbing in London and suffocated on his own vomit at dawn halfway up Primrose Hill.
As Marjorie, my fun-loving bibber of a new mother-in-law, commented afterwards: ‘He was a very distant cousin, thank God.’
She was standing this side of the bar, talking to an elderly guy with a crooked back. My face turned into a steamed flannel, although my reflection in the mirror hardly showed it.
She hadn’t noticed me. Her hair was controlled at the crown by a pink elastic band, and looked from the side like an upside-down poplar in autumn, swaying slightly as she talked.
I made for the same table in the window. Same music, same table, different light, different chair: Rimbaud. That felt good. And now I knew she played violin and was called either Riina or Kaja.
‘Hi there.’
‘Hi!’ I said. I was nodding already. ‘Hey, really, that was great violin.’
She looked at me more carefully, as if focusing. Recognition flickered. Customers are blurred faces giving orders in the machine of the day.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You don’t know much, then.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m playing really badly the violin.’
‘Then? Or generally?’
‘Eh?’
‘It was a great concert,’ I repeated, lamely.
She was frowning at me, as if trying to work me out. ‘Coffee?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah. Same again.’
She looked blank.
‘A latte,’ I said, embarrassed.
She went away, leaving me confused, all my crazy feelings pooped. It didn’t take much, did it? Inevitably, my mind cast back to the first time I met Milly, noting the contrast.
It was outside the Purcell Room, during the interval of a contemporary music concert featuring a piece by me called ‘Concourse 2’. This girl was sitting behind a table with a splat of programmes in front of her. She had the nicest smile I had ever seen, and a long, springlike curl of dark hair in front of each ear. She was glamorous. I can appreciate glamour in others. I was not glamorous: I’m not tall and I’ve never carried off smart clothes and my hair is untidy but not interestingly so: there has always been something unfinished about me. Milly was finished, in the sense that a fine violin is finished when – and only when – the last coat of varnish has been applied. She had been born like that, with all the coats of varnish already applied. When our bodies rubbed together, the varnish lay between them, and this excited me even more.
The waitress called either Kaja or Riina brought my coffee. ‘You don’t want cake? Or a savoury snack? Herring with rye bread? Beef-and-onion roll?’
‘OK, yeah, a cake,’ I said. ‘Sounds good.’
She took a menu off the neighbouring table.
I said I didn’t mind which cake. ‘Whatever’s your favourite.’
‘I like them all.’
‘You can choose, then.’
She sighed, as if this was a real pain.
‘Curd cake OK? With whipped cream? Or almond and bilberry cheesecake?’
‘Either sounds brilliant. Especially if it’s traditional Estonian. I like everything in Estonia, so far.’
She nodded, retrieving my bill from under the saucer and scribbling on it. I felt annihilated in some way. She must be used to this: older foreign blokes trying to pick her up. Her counter-st
rategy was impeccable.
When she returned with the curd cake topped by a heap of cream like washing, I had decided to drop the whole game.
‘Looks good, thanks,’ I said, hoping I sounded indifferent enough.
‘It is good,’ she said. ‘Do you want your book?’
‘My book?’
‘You left your book. That’s why you came back.’
‘But they couldn’t find it.’
‘That’s because I’d took it home.’
‘Oh,’ I said, waving my hand to cover my embarrassment, ‘you can keep it.’
‘I took it home to try mending. A lot of pages fell out.’
‘To mend it?’
‘Glue. My boyfriend has good glue. He’s a sculptor.’
I smiled appreciatively as I fell down a trapdoor set in my own heart. She had a bloke, and he was interesting, probably with huge shoulders in a sweaty singlet, hacking at granite. Or maybe even the one with the failed goatee.
‘He’s good?’
‘I dunno,’ she shrugged. ‘What’s good? He’s pretty good, I guess. You better eat the cake before me.’
I chuckled and said yes, I’d better, wondering if I should add: I’d rather eat you first. No, it was never a good idea to mock a foreigner’s English, they never understood the joke. I didn’t want to eat the cake in front of her, though – it was an object that would be difficult to tackle without making a mess. I asked, as my spoon sank in through the cream on the thinner edge of the wedge, ‘What does he sculpt?’
‘Sharks,’ she sighed. ‘He makes sharks out of marbles.’
‘Marbles? Or marble?’
‘Marble, OK. Only sharks. He … ah, you know, with a stone …’
‘Polishes? Pumice stone?’
‘No, rough to touch, on a little wheel…’
‘Grinds …’
‘Yeah, he grinds them, polishes them so they shine like crazy and they’re beautiful but he’s really miserable in doing this, he’s just all lonesome in his studio and he sees not one point. In anything at all. Sharks, or anything. Very black.’
‘Maybe he should change from sharks,’ I suggested, cheering up.
In fact, I was enjoying this conversation very much, perhaps more than any conversation I’d ever had in my life. Someone had come in and was consulting the menu. The barman called out in Estonian. She coolly raised her hand. She was evidently tired of being a waitress. Or liked talking to this customer too much. Practising her English.
‘That’s what I told him. It’s not sharks, the problem. He’s took years to get the sharks perfect, anyway. He is just a normal depressant.’
‘But he has good glue.’
‘Yeah, I mended your book. I knew you left it to mean to.’
‘Eh?’
The barman was serving the new customer, darting fierce looks in our direction.
‘He’s really lazy, this guy,’ she said, under her breath.
‘Are you Riina or Kaja?’
She paused, surprised by the question. Then she smiled and told me. I’d pronounced her name wrong: my version rhymed with raja, as in Indian prince; hers with Gaia, or all but. It disconcerted me, made me think of a cayak. ‘Riina plays better violin,’ she added.
‘You Estonian, in fact?’
‘Yeah, I’m from Haaremaa,’ she said. ‘You know Haaremaa?’
‘Er, no.’
She folded her arms and looked through the window. The sun made the cobbles look like gingerbread buns.
‘It’s an island. You have to be going there.’ She turned back to look at me.
Yes, I knew I was going to be going there, if that’s what she’d meant. As I knew when I first saw Milly that she was to be my wife. Within five seconds I had known that.
‘If it’s worth going to,’ I said.
‘It’s really neat,’ Kaja as in Gaia assured me. She had learned her English, it seemed, from an American. ‘A Soviet military’s zone until 1994, you know? Closed off. Forbidden. It was forbidden to leave, for us, without a visa stamp.’
She pulled out a cigarette from her back pocket and placed it between her lips as a film actress would, enhancing the pout. I was both pleased and disappointed that she smoked. I felt I’d been chatting to her for years. Her T-shirt had the words Planet Earth Closed For Restoration switchbacking over her chest. My eyes kept automatically returning to read the slogan, I couldn’t help it. It was Milly’s kind of slogan, that was the trouble. Kaja was looking for a light, tapping her pockets, making the words on her chest swell and squash up: Pln Eart Closd For Restratn. I pulled out the souvenir lighter I’d bought that morning and thumbed it to life.
‘Hoor?’ I smiled. ‘Hoor?’
‘Eh?’
‘Ho-or?’ I repeated, with more care, making it rhyme with a Geordie ‘poor’. I was smiling knowingly at her – an attempt at self-denigration, conscious (against the glistening wall of her Americanised English) of the absurdity of my pathetic attempt to speak her language. She was staring at me, open-mouthed, the cigarette in her hand. Then I saw the other hand coming down on my face in slow motion. It was only slow motion on a subjective level. The shock of the impact, which seemed to disintegrate in the marrow of my jaw, was mingled with the strange notion that this was a playful joke, even though the joke had propelled me half out of my chair, sending my coffee spinning away and onto the floor, along with the curd cake. The cup smashed against the metal leg of the neighbouring table and the cake splurged whitely on the floorboards.
I was dimly aware of a silence beyond the ringing in my ears and my pounding heart as I righted myself, nursing my cheek. The barman started on at Kaja, who had apparently run into the kitchen. Words, very loud and curt words, in Estonian. Kaja shouting back. I felt sick, suddenly, beyond the shock. I eased myself out of the chair, making for the door as best I could on legs moulded from blancmange. My nose was dripping blood: I saw it literally plopping onto the back of my hand. A girl in dungarees had sprayed me twenty years ago with a soda syphon in a student bar in Durham for speaking ‘posh’ (despite my council upringing), but she was a middle-class SWP member. It was explicable. This was not. Unless the girl called Kaja was mentally disturbed.
All eyes were on me: I could see this without looking. I was still holding the lighter. I hadn’t paid for the coffee and the cake. I was not about to. The barman was at the door, opening it for me.
‘We are not have sex business here,’ the barman muttered.
‘Eh?’
‘You wan some hot, you go to sauna twenty-four-hour,’ he said, in the same low growl.
‘Ah jus offered her a lighd,’ I pointed out.
‘Huh?’
‘Jus offered to lighd her cigaredde. Hodest.’
‘You a good guy?’ said the barman, with a sardonic twist to his mouth.
I sniffed and the blood tasted oddly blank. ‘I’m a travel-guide writer, checking out where to go,’ I improvised, equally sardonically. ‘For several newspapers with huge circulations in the UK. And a very big glossy book.’
The door was open. The cool air rushed in and gave me a headache. I moved my jaw wide. It wasn’t broken, although my cheek felt fractured. I’d never been hit in the face in my life, even by a bloke. A cricket ball, a football, a teddy bear whose glass eye had caught me on the nose, but never the hand of man or woman. We were out in the street, now. The door swung shut behind us, along with the furtive stares of the other customers. I dabbed my nose with a tissue. I wanted to go back to London.
‘We get a lotta shit, sorry,’ said the barman, out of the corner of his mouth; he was lighting his own cigarette now, shielding the match expertly. ‘Shit people. Every girl a hoor. Every girl not hoor, in Estonia. More educationed than you. Don’t put in your book this thing. My name, Andres.’
He flicked the match away and held his hand out, but I didn’t shake it because a very large penny had dropped from a great height into the cavernous and stony spaces of my mind, and the echo was still going. My wh
ole face was burning: a great rush of blood to join the shifting aches and pains.
‘Oh Jesus,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe it. My mind is bollocks. I thought hoor meant this.’
I thumbed the lighter in my hand. The breeze blew the flame out. ‘It was the taxi driver. Olev. I make a very big mis-take,’ I went on, adopting an Estonian accent for purposes of clarity. ‘Error. Like computer error. You know? Stupid jerk, me.’
Andres at last let his hand drop and frowned, the studs in his nose winking in the pale sun. A real praying mantis, his nose was. He probably wasn’t very bright, despite his hip look. He’d even believed the travel-guide thing. My teeth ached. I was gesticulating as I explained. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard the other familiar word behind the Estonian word. Something to do with mental recognition: it’s quite normal, apparently.
Then Andres started to grin. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I unnerstan’, yeah. Tulemasin. Not hoor, shit no! You know what hoor mean?’
His hoor sounded like something whooshing up into the sky, or something getting caught in a fan. It had lost all semblance of being a word. It was all like a joke going on too long.
‘I do now,’ I said. ‘Same word in English.’
Andres shook his box of matches. ‘Tuletikk.’ Then he pointed to my lighter. ‘Tulemasin.’
I repeated the words. ‘Yeah, I’ll remember that. Thank you.’
‘Estonian girl, they hit hard. Only Lithuania girl they hit more harder.’
‘I definitely wouldn’t like to be hit by a Lithuanian girl, in that case,’ I said, mournfully – and the barman burst out laughing and put his arm round me. I laughed, too.
I felt better, standing there in the street with Andres; we were like two old mates, laughing away as passers-by glanced at us nervously and moved on.