by Adam Thorpe
Then the phone rang. I let it ring on and on, my heart beating against my ribs. It stopped. The shower’s heat off her body was amazing: the shower knob was further into the red than usual, I noticed.
‘Your mum?’
‘Bound to be,’ I said, shivering from the tiles. ‘I speak to her every day.’
She nodded. Then she folded the towel carefully at my feet and knelt down in front of me.
‘This,’ she said, uncrossing my arms and placing my hands behind her head. I slid my fingers together and rested them on the back of her skull, on her wet hair. ‘I did this to him. Otherwise he’d have report me to his grandfather, high up in our Supreme Soviet, for singing Estonian songs. Welcome to Siberia, Kaja.’
‘I won’t report you,’ I said, stroking the warm wet hair as she began, my breath breaking against my own words. ‘Although I’m really high up in the Supreme Soviet.’
I widened my feet and watched her carefully and she in turn watched me with intent, upturned eyes. ‘I would really like you to sing some Estonian songs,’ I added.
And she started humming at the same time, right at the back of her throat, so that I could feel it as a vibration in my slicked knob. And I vowed, in the delirium of my pleasure, that I would insert these songs into the piece for the Millennium Dome.
We took the coach together, four hours cross-country to the coast, the western coast of Estonia, and then the coach bumped onto the ferry, and in under an hour we were on the island of Haaremaa. Sometimes the impossible is merely imaginary, and what actually happens is easy.
Kaja had a brother; he was off studying German in Berlin. She was going home anyway, it was her holiday, she’d worked right through the summer and now the summer was over.
On the coach I told her more about the piece I was writing, about my interest in Arvo Pärt’s music. She knew a bit about her compatriot’s work, but not very much. She knew the album Alina, for instance, and Summa, and had gone to a performance of Kanon Pokajanen in the spring.
We’d visited all the main churches in Tallinn together, and taken a trip out to the Kadriorg Palace and the Tallinn TV tower. We’d held hands in the tram and hugged tight in the palace’s huge park, where we’d imagined the Tsarina’s summers, the elegant retinues in top hats and stays, the abundant muslin dresses. Between the bouncing red squirrels and the blustering leaves, we were completely wrapped up in ourselves.
I phoned home when Kaja was packing in her hostel. (Her hostel – clean and friendly, she said, but as basic as it was cheap – was in the grim suburbs, and she refused to let me visit her there.) I picked a time when I knew Milly would be working, and left a message on the machine. I was travelling around the countryside, I said, picking up Estonian folk songs in this land of singers, and would make contact on my return to Tallinn. Remember what Cardew had said, Mill? How there were no real folk songs any more? Well, I was hoping to find them.
I felt weirdly cool about it all. About the fact that I was treating Milly, not as my missus, but as an obstruction.
Haaremaa was an island of near-pristine bogs and forest and marshy edges, with the occasional white, empty beach stretching as far as the eye could see, and limestone barenesses known as alvars, struggled on by lichens. Cranes and seabirds flew in the northern sky, wintering over on the warmer westerly side. Kaja explained again that, being where it was, facing Sweden, sentinel in the Bay of Finland, the island had been a strictly controlled military zone under the Soviets. It was opened up only five years ago, in 1994, when the soldiers left. It had been the site of terrible battles in the Second World War, with tens of thousands of deaths and entire villages vanishing under shells, flamethrowers, the treads of tanks.
In fact, I had picked up this much already from my Baltic States’ guidebook, although there had been very little about Haaremaa. But I nodded, as if fascinated. The way she told it, I was fascinated. The movement of her lips made it fascinating, for a start-off.
Kaja, in the coach, went on to tell me more interesting details, in fact, the kind of details no guidebook ever gets to. Her mother’s uncles had both been killed – on opposite sides: one in the German Army, his brother in the Red Army. They had almost fought each other. That’s why their sister, her grandmother, had drunk a lot and gone crazy. Then there were terrible purges after the war, she said: thousands of islanders either fled to Sweden in little boats or were sent to Siberia by Stalin. The civilian population was reduced by a third.
I shook my head, running flickering images of horror inside it. It reminded me of my mum recounting the Blitz: the majestic scale of it, history as a god, the massive hairy knuckles making contact.
Her grandfather fled in a little boat, and wanted to come back for the others but couldn’t, staying for good on Gotland where he married a Swedish slut. ‘A slut to the rest of his family, anyway.’ I’d provided the word ‘slut’. Kaja remembered the island of her youth as being full of Russian soldiers with clipped hair and large ears, of no-go zones behind link fences and barbed wire where camouflaged silos hid huge rockets, ready to bring about the end of the world.
The coach rumbled on through what seemed to be empty countryside on an empty, potholed road that ran straight across the north-west mainland of Estonia. I loved the shifting of Kaja’s face as she talked. She was eleven years younger than me – I had all but forgotten that inconvenient and ultimately unimportant fact. She had ‘trodden water’ for a while after school, the newly independent country still sorting itself out, still chaotic. She had worked in a biscuit factory, one of the last factories still operating on Haaremaa. Her mother was a supervisor in the same factory. I told her that my mother had also been a supervisor in a factory, but that her English factory made sausages and ice cream.
‘And your father, Jack?’
‘My father also worked in a factory. He was a skilled electrician, working for EMI. There was a big EMI factory in Hayes. He’s now retired. My mother,’ I added, as I never usually did, ‘is blind. There was an accident in her factory. Something dropped on her head, it wasn’t an explosion or a spill. It blinded her.’
‘That’s sad,’ said Kaja, a little too easily.
I thought she wasn’t going to pursue it, but after a bit she said, turning back from the window, ‘How old were you?’
‘About five? It’s weird, I don’t really remember it. The accident, I mean. I don’t remember her ever not being blind. But that’s because there wasn’t much difference between when she was and when she wasn’t, probably, because she hid it. Still does. And it’s not something we ever mentioned in the family. Still don’t. I’ve never heard the word “blind” at home.’
Kaja nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘So that’s why you became a composer,’ she said. ‘The blind people have better ears. For music, you don’t need to see.’
I was shocked. I’d never made the connection. I pretended that I had.
‘Yeah, probably. I dunno. I think maybe I’d shown interest before her accident, though.’
‘By the way, did she have your big brown eyes?’
‘I suppose she did,’ I said. ‘I mean, she still does. It’s just they’ve kind of gone sort of blank. Sometimes she hardly opens her eyelids.’
This whole subject was painful to me, and I wondered why I’d brought it up. My mum had never come to terms with not being able to see. Neither had I ever come to terms with it, which is why I hardly ever brought it up. And when I did, I was usually disappointed by the reaction.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing out of the window at a couple of grey, barrack-like buildings next to a cluster of threadbare barns.
‘A collectivised farm,’ said Kaja.
‘I’ve heard all about them,’ I said. ‘Looks pretty dire.’
‘Dire?’
‘Horrible.’
‘Yeah, it was a bad idea. But at least there were people in the farms. Now there’s no one.’
I pulled Kaja’s hand out from under her thigh, then brought her hand to my lips and kissed it o
n the knuckles. It was warm from being pressed on by her thigh, and smelt of cloth and sweat.
The coach was carrying us both in a straight line to somewhere as misty as guesswork. My alternative future! Don’t you ever wish you could live two parallel lives at once? I knew I would not be leaving Milly. And yet I also knew that I would spend all of the time left to me with Kaja. The two times were at different levels of my being, two performances conducted at either end of the same room, independent but not clashing tonally – cooperating in some mysterious, apparently haphazard way. I wanted to open her button flies and let my fingers skip about in there. I wondered what Milly was doing right now: pushing photovoltaic panels on some poor planet-caring geezer, I guessed.
‘And your dad, Kaja?’
I’d forgotten she’d already told me. He’d been an inspector of construction sites under the Russians, she said; now he was unemployed. He did building work here and there. When the Russians went, so did most of the jobs. And health security, pensions, all that. They had to start all over again.
‘But we will do it, we will do it.’
She was looking out of the window, as if the rolling landscape was part of the doing. If I was to say that I wanted to marry her, I couldn’t really mean it. But a part of me did mean it. I touched the corner of her mouth with my lips. The ambergris scent was not subtle, she must have splashed it on or maybe it was cheap, but I didn’t mind. Her lips were naturally flushed, as if not yet quite used to being exposed to air. She didn’t pout them, or change them in any way, as I pecked at the tuck of the corner five or six times. She knew they were perfect just as they were. It lit a little ring of flames in my groin.
‘I’m sure you will,’ I murmured, into her ear, finding it like a fruit through leaves and closing my teeth gently on the lobe, which made her giggle. The ambergris gave the skin a chemical garnish.
‘You know what Haaremaa means?’ she said, pulling away as the coach rocked.
‘It’s a very beautiful word.’
‘It means the island of enfolding, haarama. Some say it’s the island of gripping, because it doesn’t let you go. In Estonian, haare means grip. But it’s probably the island of the aspens, haa, from the Danish times, and we’ve forgotten. Do you have aspens in England?’
I nodded. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember what an aspen looked like. Maybe like the ones I thought were aspens in the park below the castle. Or were they alders?
‘Their leaves tremble,’ she said, as if she knew I didn’t know. ‘They don’t live too long.’
The Estonian words had made her both alien to me and even more familiar, with their extended softnesses.
‘I like the island of enfolding best,’ I said, stealing an arm around her and pressing her to me on the seat. ‘My aspen.’
She gripped my free hand tight, as a joke, unconsciously hurting my knuckles. She still had a gymnast’s strength, where she’d had to grip the bar and swing and maybe go right over and round again.
When Kaja introduced me to her parents, I recognised the words for ‘English’, the name ‘Jack’, and possibly the words for ‘guide’ and ‘composer’.
‘Hello!’ I said, with a hearty grin, shaking my girl’s parents’ hands. I felt weirdly carefree.
They seemed very glad to meet me. The mother had eaten too many biscuits and was jowly, but had probably also been a beauty once. The father was handsome, still well built, and had given his daughter the blue-green eyes. He smelt slightly of drink and sweat and plaster.
‘Hello, you are welcome,’ the mother said, surprising me. ‘Welcome to Haaremaa, a very good place.’
She didn’t know how she had learned her English. Perhaps from her children. She really didn’t know, she admitted. It just happened. I soon realised that it was very limited, but I was still impressed.
I was relieved by their ordinariness, in fact. They couldn’t have been more different from Milly’s parents. The thought struck me as I sat in the modest kitchen with its old, noisy fridge and battered gas cooker, its view through midge-speckled net curtains onto a bare dirt area where a lone kid was cycling in circles. Wadhampton Hall seemed like a joke, here. Actually, England seemed like a joke, here, with its flabby Friday-night drunks and Gardeners’ Question Time, its candlelit yak about nannies and house prices and air-conditioned Land Rovers. As if material prosperity was all that mattered, while the world’s poor could go fuck. Sitting there in that simple kitchen, I felt I would like to scald my country free of all that, with a boiling bucket of indignation. Yet how could I? I was also a fat cat, annexed to the du Cranes’ ancient and self-expanding universe of English wealth by dint of a marriage ring. Even though I’d taken it off, temporarily.
There was one framed photo of the family taken a few years back, when Kaja was about fourteen. It was the only picture in the kitchen, apart from a wildlife calendar and a prize certificate with Kaja’s name written in above a discreet red Soviet star and a flying red gymnast. The photograph was black and white, fogged over as if the chemicals were unstable. Kaja was dressed in school uniform.
Later, when her parents were out of the kitchen, chatting with a neighbour, Kaja told me that a friend of the family – a military photographer – had developed the picture unofficially in his lab housed in the main rocket station. No film for sale, in Soviet days! Taking pictures was dangerous. It was very easy to be called a spy.
All this seemed so strange to me. I might as well have been looking at some exotic marvel in Peru. I thought: My life has been that dull? Well, up until now, yes. Now it’s gonna change.
We had walked from the nearby bus stop where the coach had dropped us. Her parents lived on the fringe of the main town, which was on the sea, if somewhat reedily so. The town was pretty and on the sleepy side, to say the least. It had low, Nordic-looking old houses and dazzling-white churches and not many people. We’d passed a patch of wasteland where a sign announced an imminent hypermarket – Finnish, Kaja said – and come to a haphazard estate of about ten rectangular blocks, built in crumbly Soviet concrete. Each block had six floors and a main porch of uneven, clumsily grouted bricks. The buildings were set down with a wistful disregard for order or design, while the lack of pavement, proper tarmac or floral tubs was a surprising plus: the estate was bleak but airy, with plenty of space between the buildings – not nearly as depressing as the equivalent place in Britain would have been.
There was absolutely no graffiti, nothing highly strung about the atmosphere, and no soiled kebab or KFC wrappers. There were no louts toughing it out with helpless old folk, either. Not as far as I could see. You were unlikely to be started on, here.
It was very quiet, too, because there weren’t many cars: most of the cars were beaten-up, rusty Soviet models – Trabant, Moskvich, ZAZ – although there was a Renault Espace and a Ford Granada and a couple of VW Beetles among them: some people were getting rich, I surmised, but Kaja said that these were hire vehicles all owned by one man who called himself Elvis and wore dark blue shades.
I felt immediately at home, here. I had no idea why.
Kaja’s parents owned an ex-KGB GAZ-13 Chaika – a black Chevy-style sedan with big chrome bumpers. You could see the ground go by next to the passenger seat, Kaja said – or would have done, if the vehicle hadn’t temporarily given up the ghost. It was up on blocks in front of the ground-floor apartment. Its leather seats were torn, as if with a knife.
Kaja’s parents also had a dacha, about ten minutes’ drive away, a short sandy path from the sea. In the old days they would all cycle to the dacha. It was built by Kaja’s father over ten summers, on land loaned to them by the Soviets in lieu of a full wage. They would go to it this evening, Kaja said, by bicycle. It would take about half an hour. I very much looked forward to the dacha. I drank tea in the kitchen and listened properly for the first time to the strange, attractive language, modulated so differently from English. Then Kaja translated a question from her mother, who was grinning at me expectantly.
> ‘I hope you don’t mind, but she says to me, “Ask him, is he a widow man?” I don’t know why she thinks this, sorry.’
I pulled a face. ‘A widower, you mean. Not that I know of.’
They laughed at my English humour and so I added, stoking it further, ‘I think you have to be married first.’
I felt terrible, in fact, but sipped my tea and nibbled the factory’s biscuits with an innocent’s appreciative smile. The indent where the ring had been was still visible. Perhaps Kaja’s mother was highly observant – more observant than her daughter. But didn’t widowers keep their rings on?
‘We love music in Estonia,’ Kaja translated, after a long speech from her mother.
‘Is that all she said?’
‘Basically, yes,’ Kaja said. ‘You know about the Singing Revolution already. I told her you are an important young composer.’
‘I like the young bit,’ I grinned, seeing a range of faces, all fellow composers, bobbing madly up and down like tin ducks in a fairground.
‘More than the important?’
‘Well, most composers are only important when they’re dead.’
Kaja translated the exchange for her mother, who laughed merrily, but with a glance at me that held just a shadow of suspicion in the sad eyes. Kaja’s father had left us to mend a light in the bedroom. I wished this had all happened ten years ago. You’re never allowed a second chance, not really. I calculated that ten years ago I was still a year older than Kaja was now, but full of dreams. In twelve years’ time I’d be nearly fifty. No dreams.
‘She asks if you like the biscuits?’
‘I love them. I’m very happy. Thank you. Your daughter is an excellent official guide,’ I added, trying to hide any trace of innuendo.
Kaja’s mum chuckled appreciatively. She was called Maarje, which was quite a coincidence – pronounced like Marjorie drunk or with a stroke. In ten days’ time I would be leaving Estonia, leaving Kaja, leaving my heart behind. It was like a very gamey song. Maybe, for the Dome, I should write a very gamey song. That’s what most people, from Tony Blair and the Queen down, would most appreciate. In the context, it would be seen as ironic. Or maybe not. Maybe it would be the end of my career. Or the start of another.