by Adam Thorpe
I undress in Kaja’s old room, where we made love while Maarje was chatting to the aunt on the phone. Nothing has altered: the china squirrel’s still begging us to stop on the windowsill. But we didn’t stop. And Jaan was the result, of that I am pretty sure.
The dirt sticks doggedly – to my ankles most of all. After the shower, I can smell my clothes, much riper than I thought. But not unpleasant.
Maarje phones Kaja, after the shower; I hear my name embedded in the Estonian, repeated urgently several times with nods of the head, as if Kaja can’t believe it on the other end of the line. Then I’m handed the phone. My heart thumping in my throat.
Kaja sounds worried, rather than surprised.
‘Are you chasing me?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I just miss Jaan, Kaja. I did the hotel tissue test. My box is almost empty. My mum’s died and my wife’s left me.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
A pause. She sighs. I think I can hear Jaan talking in the background.
‘Oh God. I’m sorry about your mother.’
‘Not about my wife,’ I say, but keeping it light so she can hear my smile.
‘Because of me, was it?’
‘No, she left me because of me.’
I wonder how disappointed she is, to hear that.
‘You aren’t going to take him away?’
‘I don’t think kidnapping is my line, somehow. Look, Kaja, I’ve got something to tell you. It’s completely crazy, but there we go. I can’t tell you over the hooter.’
‘The hooter?’
‘The phone.’
‘Toomas my husband knows about you. He’ll be worried.’
‘Tell him not to be. It’s not that crazy. I don’t want to get heavy about this, but I do have a kind of – well, um, I’m allowed to see my son, aren’t I?’
‘When it’s your convenience.’
‘Kaja, that’s just not cricket. You’ll see why that’s not cricket, when I’ve told you what I want to tell you. Please?’
The bicycle is hung on a hook in the boiler room, like a giant pair of spectacles perched on a nose. It takes some time to get the tyres pumped up – one of them has a slow leak, from lack of use. The gritty roads mean I have to stop twice on the way, to get it tight again, and the saddle is loose so that I all but slide off backwards. The junior cricket set is slung across my back like a guitar, tied around me with twine. The odd passer-by stares. In my tramp’s shapeless hat and stained trekker’s jacket, I must look like the supreme English eccentric.
Or a complete git.
The house itself is off a main grit road, down a grassy track next to a big church destroyed in the war and partially rebuilt. I pass two or three other houses crouched along the green lane, with vegetable patches and battered-looking cars. An old couple raise their hands in greeting. One of the houses is derelict, holding itself together by a miracle of crossed beams and wattle, with a dark vault of a barn alongside. Five minutes further up, past a freshly sprouting birch copse and a couple of small meadows, there’s a carved letter box in the shape of a steepled tower. You lift the steeple to put the post in.
A crooked, low-slung building with attic windows in its thatch; a leaning barn; a green yard. It’s unpretentiously pretty. Wooden sculptures shaped like giant corkscrews give it a bohemian flavour. An old blue Saab with its passenger door resprayed in violet, like a subdued hippy wagon, reminds me of the seventies in Britain. The trees in which the place buries itself – mostly birch and alder – are leafing from their buds in droves. The sun shines fitfully and the air smells of grass and forest mulch and manure. A few hens scrabble about in happy freedom, and what I think are white ducks paddle about in a bath with a plank for access.
The house seems closed off to me, about its own quiet business, but not unfriendly.
They’ll be waiting for me. Toomas is an unknown quantity, he might be difficult. On the other hand, he’ll probably be a very open and easy-going guy with an earring.
My bum hurts from the loose saddle. I breathe in deeply and square my shoulders. I have to look in control.
I ring a tiny Pärt-like bell, dangling by the unvarnished door. This is like a fairy tale. Someone has collected red hips, hawthorn or rose, and put them on an old plate on a shelf in the rickety porch. They’re as bright as blood, even after months. No one comes. I give the door a strong rap with my knuckles. Nothing. As I open the thick door a crack, crouching and peering in, it disappears to be replaced by Kaja’s chest. I straighten up clumsily and grin.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘My God, what a hat.’
‘I rang, but…’
I am embarrassed.
‘We had the radio on,’ she explains.
‘No, it’s fine.’
‘Well, please, come in.’
When I am inside, shuffling from foot to foot and wishing I had never come, Kaja puts her hands either side of her face and says, ‘This is so mad!’
‘Crazy,’ I agree. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Your nose and head? Someone hit you again?’
I smile. ‘Actually, I was going to say I fell off my bicycle in London. In fact, I did get hit. In Tallinn. By English drunks.’
‘Do you ask to be hit?’
‘Probably.’
‘You were drunk?’
‘A definite no-no. Sober as a judge.’
She frowns. It’s hopeless. I shouldn’t be here. I turn to go but she calls out for Jaan. No answer. She tells me to wait right where I am and goes off through a low door in the corner of the room.
I wait, feeling I am sculling softly over my own depths.
Everything in the room is dark and wooden, apart from the metallic gleam of a stereo. There is a peaty, earthy smell, perhaps of burned logs from the fireplace. It reminds me of the shallow bogs I’ve had to squelch through over the last few days, but it’s not unpleasant.
‘Look, Jaan, it’s our friend from England. It’s Jack!’
I find myself kneeling down and gathering Jaan in my arms and squeezing him. Then I unhitch the cricket set in its plastic sheath.
‘Where’s our pitch, chief?’
Jaan takes the set with huge eyes. I start pulling out the bat like a sword from its scabbard.
‘It’s yours,’ I say. ‘Oh, and so is this.’
I produce, from an inside pocket in my jacket, a somewhat crumpled sheaf of papers. Jaan’s more interested in the cricket bat.
‘What’s that, Jaan?’ asks Kaja.
‘Music,’ says Jaan, glancing at it, fishing with the length of his arm for the ball.
‘It’s a score,’ I tell him. ‘It’s for you. It’s called Seven Cheers for Jaan and it’s basically seven practice pieces for solo viola.’
Kaja leans over to look. ‘You wrote that?’
‘Sure did,’ I say, sitting on my heels. ‘I wrote it this week. It’s full of bird sounds and sounds of water and the wind in the trees.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ says Kaja.
‘It’s my job,’ I smile.
The floorboards squeak and Toomas comes in, drying his hands on a rag. I stand up, the score in my hands, sensing my body go apologetic under my stained shirt and trousers.
‘Hello. I’m Jack.’
‘I think he must see that,’ says Kaja, with an ambiguous smile that flusters me for a moment. Her eyes examine my clothes for the first time. ‘Hey, what have you been doing?’
‘Tuning streams by moving stones,’ I reply, feeling like a real intruder.
The first surprise is that Toomas is short and wiry and has no earring. The second is that he is extremely restrained in his welcome. He’s clean-shaven, with a blond ponytail and a tiredness under his pale blue eyes, standing with the rag in his hand. Of course, he’s known Kaja since school. He must be her age.
Toomas speaks very little English. His hand is like sandpaper when I shake it. There is fight in him, a kind of residual anger. I can feel it i
n the firm squeeze of his hand.
‘Don’t worry, I’m going to be learning Estonian,’ I say. ‘Tuletikk. Tikutoos. Välgumihkel. Rebane.’
Toomas tightens his mouth in what might have been a grim smile. He says something to Kaja.
‘He says Estonian is very purging for the digestion.’
I nod and smile, assuming this is a joke. But Toomas has already turned and left us to our own devices.
The first of these consists of a quick tour of the place. Jaan’s viola is in his little room in the eaves. There is an action photo of me with the red ball, looking as if I have serious rickets, taken in Kensington Gardens. It is pinned to a cork board along with some other London snaps: a lopsided Tower of London; Kaja by half a Horse Guard; Jaan in front of the elephant cage at the Zoo. Jaan shows them off proudly.
‘You liked London?’
Jaan shrugs, his eyes checking with his mother.
‘Say what you think, Jaanie,’ Kaja insists.
‘I got hit,’ says Jaan.
I nod, pulling a face. ‘Yeah, I know the feeling.’
‘Money, money, money,’ says Kaja, suddenly. ‘Nothing else. The only thing that’s important, there.’
‘Dead right,’ I agree. ‘Yup, dead right. Sad.’
Jaan tries out the first Cheer, having some difficulty at first with my handwritten score, the paper spattered with mud and rippled from an encounter with a leaking bottle. Within half an hour, with some coaching, Jaan has got it. We listen without stirring as he plays its four minutes right through. He has, I’m thinking, an astonishing sense of what is needed for every phrase.
And I didn’t expect him to understand it so quickly – its mixture of the plangent and the joyful in its chromatic shifting, like a young child with an old face, a child who cannot die and maybe doesn’t want to.
Of course, I have to pretend to be scratching under my eyes, afterwards, catching the salt moisture on my finger-pads. Then I blow my nose.
‘Hay fever,’ I say.
Kaja has her face turned away, towards the window.
‘That was really swell, my Jaan,’ she says. Her voice is pitched a little too high, as if something is constricting her throat.
We visit the yard. Their hens, Kaja says, are really lazy, and all twenty or so of the dacha’s hens have been slaughtered by the fox, so they have to buy their eggs now from a distant cousin. It’s hard to buy so many new hens on the island, these days.
‘The fox?’
‘That old sad fox in the cage. To keep the other foxes away. Someone let him out.’
I pull a convincing face. Convincing to me, at least.
‘Why?’
‘I dunno. Maybe kids did it. It’s just a true foxy fox, of course,’ she adds. She twirls a finger against her temple. ‘But mad, maybe. Like an escaped prisoner. Blood and feathers all over the shop,’ she adds in a murmur, out of Jaan’s earshot. ‘Not one left without an injury or dead. Horrible.’
I nod knowingly, feeling confused, feeling a strange dark confusion in my chest.
‘Maybe it wasn’t that actual fox.’
‘Maybe. We just put two things together, though.’
I will buy them twenty more hens, somehow. Maybe first I’ll have to do something about the fox. The thought of it vaguely scares me, or maybe the thought of having to track it down: its yellow eyes in the woods. Its slipperiness.
We stop in the barn to watch Toomas plane a huge beam, a battered ghetto blaster pumping out AC/DC. There is a hint of reefer in the perfume of sweet sawdust. He doesn’t turn round, but it isn’t an unfriendly back. It is a very concentrated back.
‘I’ll need to do something about his taste in music,’ I laugh, as we emerge from the barn.
Jaan is bursting with impatience. He grips the cricket set to his chest as if it is his life raft.
‘Unkalalunka Jack,’ he says.
‘Is that me? Wow. Sounds like a Zulu god.’
‘We’ll go to the beach and play cricket,’ Kaja announces. ‘Get your coat, Jaanie.’
At the end of the track, silent and invisible beyond a marshy meadow and an inlet of waving reeds, is the sea. The path turns right and continues for a hundred yards or so, following the coast, before it veers left, snaking along the head of the saltmarsh to cut through low dunes and out onto the beach. The sea’s sighs and whispers envelop us suddenly as we clear the dunes, the marram grass biting at our legs. The sand is white and firm. There is a coolish wind and the light scuds in fits over the water. Trees flourish right up to the sand beyond the saltmarsh, the shoreline curving round into the far distance: poplars of a dazzlingly fresh green are waving in the sea breeze. It is exceptionally beautiful, if not quite real, like something out of an eighteenth-century oil.
Jaan is still hopeless at cricket, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll improve over the years, I’m thinking. We’ll start an island team. My own bowling is hampered by nerves. I try overarm, surprised by the whiffs of my shirt. Kaja watches me as she fields in the slips. Then she bowls against me, underarm but rather expertly, and when I strike the ball into the creamy surf, she squeals like a little girl.
Jaan runs after the ball in his limping, cockeyed way, retrieving it as it is rolled up by the power of the sea.
‘Here! Jaanie! Here!’ yells Kaja.
She’s jumping up and down, gesticulating wildly as I plod between the wicket – three times, four times, five … and finally let myself be run out, throwing myself forward into the sand as Kaja sends the long bail flying with an excited whoop. I can’t imagine Toomas fooling about like this.
On the way back, I take Jaan’s small hand and feel it flex with the need to have it held by a father. There is hope in it. It isn’t just need. It makes me want to shout out loud, at any rate. I wonder when Kaja will break the news to Jaan.
This is your father, Jaanie. Your pappa.
We stop to admire the derelict house. It’s hard to imagine in its present state, but Kaja tells me it was a rare example of the island’s original architecture. The glass in the windows is blurred with cobwebs and the thatch is mossed over a dark green. Black plastic sheets flap and sway in the wind. A rusty bicycle with handles like antlers is smothered in decaying, creeping growth.
‘That’s really sad,’ she says, ‘about your mother.’
‘Hit me left field, even though it was expected, you know?’
‘Left field?’
‘From the side, kind of unexpected.’
She nods slowly. I feel I am talking nonsense. Too much to explain.
And then: ‘I used to visit here with my father,’ Kaja says. ‘An old lady with arthritis. She told us about the war. Bodies everywhere. Terrible things. Her whole family. Throats cut. Hung like meat in that barn.’
Jaan is bouncing the ball off the barn’s crooked wall.
I let the silence ride, grow thicker as it travels. The silence congeals into history, as if history is a ball of silence that never goes away, but continues in your head.
There is Haaremaa sand in my boots, again. I feel at home. There is, for every single person alive, somewhere on earth that is their deep and unexpected home, even if glimpsed only from a train or a car. It feels right to have Haaremaa sand in my boots, again.
‘They have really gone, now,’ murmurs Kaja, at last. ‘Where to, I dunno. They were ready, I guess.’
‘Gone away?’
‘I think.’
‘To somewhere really good,’ I nod, keen to encourage this. ‘White clouds, maybe. White clouds, you know? Where the dead go.’
We look up. There is a wispy white and grey in swatches over the blue, not really what I meant.
‘Maybe. I hope for that, at least.’
The sky seems to be moving in one mass against the tree-tops. I’m not quite sure who she’s talking about, now.
‘You know, it was like we … us two … we coincidenced,’ she said.
‘Coincided.’
‘Maybe.’
Or perhaps
she does mean that new word, coincidenced. I think how sometimes I feel I’m no more than a coincidence of this me and that me. Maybe it applies to the dead, too. Or our memories. Or other people we meet or just fail to meet or don’t follow up. I am in a foreign country, on a lonely island, and the air is different. But I have a past here, already.
I notice she’s not smoking any more. Maybe she only smoked in London, the number-one stressville. We watch Jaan run about with the bat, using it as a gun, making vague blowing-up noises. I want to comment on this, to make some clever comment about the state of the world, but feel anything I say would be an implied criticism of her mothering.
In front of the abandoned barn, whose smell of mouldering hay is as sour as cat’s piss, I decide never to tell her about the fox, to confess my role in its release. Until we’re very old.
She is looking at me with the corner of her mouth tucked in, as if she’s reading my thoughts. It is an ambiguous look that I have to turn away from, to watch Jaan swipe the tender young grass with the cricket bat.
We’re invited to Maarje’s for supper. Before we leave in the old blue Saab with the violet door, I tell Kaja what happened between me and Milly. About the whole disaster, the tearing-up, right up to my island tramp – and what I now plan to do. I add that she must not take the blame, but she doesn’t look as if she was planning to. It takes all of twenty minutes.
I’m surprised at her lack of surprise, at the way she listens as if she knows about it all already. She sips her green tea calmly as she listens. We can hear an electric saw whining from the barn through the CD she’s put on the stereo – a sampler from a record label sent to Radio Haaremaa. Right now it’s a song by Castledown, an obscure newish folk band I like. It’s called ‘The Attending’.
‘I know this,’ I say, surprised. ‘Really delicate and ambiguous. Really nice steely plucked guitar.’
‘I love it,’ she says.
‘It’s sad, though. Another bitter-sweet song about love.’
She picks up the ball and rolls it to Jaan, who carries on bouncing it against the beam, playing catch.
‘Hey, about your big plan,’ she says. ‘I have to tell Toomas.’
‘Could be a problem?’
‘I’m three-months pregnant. It’s no problem.’