The Death of the Perfect Sentence

by Rein Raud

  What would you do if you were a television reporter, a citizen of the Kingdom of Sweden and in a splendid mood? Maybe you would have a glass of champagne? Definitely, but that could wait until a little later. An hour or so later at the ferry bar, for example. Right now you might go and have a walk instead. And that is exactly what Kenneth Lindblom does. In any case, he has one more thing he needs to take care of before heading to the harbour.

  Two years ago, when he first visited Tallinn, he could not have dreamt of such a thing. A year ago he would have certainly been wary, even if he’d heard a bombshell like that from someone close and trustworthy, to say nothing of some unfamiliar, slightly fanatical activist at the Estonian House in Stockholm. But now he had no doubt at all that the game was worth the candle.

  If you don’t take risks, you don’t get to drink champagne. That was apparently what they said in these parts.

  Kenneth headed at a relaxed pace through Pasatski park in the direction of the town centre, along the road he might have walked down if he’d been staying at Viru Hotel as he was supposed to. He’d walked down this road before, but this time he was especially interested in the trees – or to be precise, in one particular tree. He knew very well where that tree was situated, even though he’d obviously left the map of the park, with its paths, benches and a red mark in a certain spot, back in Stockholm.

  He looked around, didn’t see anything suspicious, stepped off the path, and shoved his hand into the hollow of the tree.

  It was empty.

  Which you could no longer say of the spot next to Kenneth.

  “Damned fool!” said the man behind the table. He was prone to corpulence but otherwise in good physical shape, and had turned red in the face from anger. His words were aimed at his colleague, who was a fair bit younger than him, and junior in rank. He’d just reported on the Swede, and was now sitting across the table, hunched up as small as possible. “You damned stupid bastard!”

  “I didn’t get there in time, Comrade Major,” said the younger man, trying to explain. “I was just too late.”

  That was the truth. As soon as he’d made sure of what was in the envelope, he’d started to head back, planning to place the envelope back into the tree hollow. But when he arrived he found the Swede already there. Of course there was no doubt what he was looking for. Just like there was no reason to suppose that he would ever be given a visa to visit the Soviet Union again. But since the Swede had sussed out what was going on with lightning speed and had jumped back on to the path like a frightened deer, it was unfortunately not possible to accuse him of spying, clap him in irons and deliver him to the KGB building on Pagari Street. In the current climate something like that could cause an international scandal: the security organs would be accused of baseless harassment of a foreign journalist in search of a scoop. And Major Vinkel would not have that.

  And so at first they did not know precisely who this person was, or what exactly was going on. Nor did they know how it was all being orchestrated from abroad.

  Naturally Kenneth Lindblom was thoroughly searched at the port. Naturally he had to part with the photos of the blue, black and white flag, and a whole shipload of passengers had to wait while his interview with Heinz Valk was listened to, in an office which was assigned for such purposes. In the end they didn’t take that from him, but then it wasn’t so significant without the photographs. In the ship’s bar he ordered brandy instead of champagne. Two brandies. It had been one of those days.

  Meanwhile, Major Vinkel was sitting lost in thought.

  He’d long since suspected that those guys with the banners weren’t as innocent as they appeared, but he hadn’t suspected that there could be a thread leading directly from them to foreign intelligence agencies (who else could be behind all this?). He wasn’t as paranoid as his comrades in Moscow who, to put it figuratively, saw the long arm of the CIA behind every sloppily tied Pioneer neckerchief. But then nor was he as naïve as some of that new lot in the Party Central Committee who thought that letting critically minded poets go on foreign trips presented absolutely no danger to the socialist order, rather that it showed the Party in a better light because it was open to rational dialogue. Major Vinkel knew very well that every one of us was a soldier on the battlefield of an information war, and that in the end the outcome of the war would not be decided by the number of tanks or nuclear warheads, but by the strength of the trenches which were dug into people’s minds – although he also had to concede that the ideological work they’d been doing for a couple of decades now hadn’t produced the expected results. Kryuchkov had visited from Moscow, lectured the locals, made a real dog’s dinner of things, and now they had to lap up the consequences. How could the people in Moscow not understand that all that stuff was grist for the Americans’ mill? If you really want to tighten the screws, then give us a decent screwdriver to do it with, damn it!

  In general, Vinkel favoured a fair but firm approach. He didn’t do the interrogations himself, as he knew that he was likely to fly off the handle and start shouting at the suspect. For that same reason, they didn’t tend to let him report to the senior bosses. But he had no equal when it came to planning, analysis and coordination of operations. He knew that himself. And as a professional in his field he could appreciate how well his colleagues handled the interrogations. Take for example Yevstigneyev, or now that Särg too, whom Fyodor Kuzmich had assigned to help him from the sixth department, which investigated economic crimes. They knew how to talk to suspects calmly and patiently – not like Ots or Zhukov, who would always resort to harsher methods too quickly, such as, for example, dispatching suspects to Seewald mental hospital for electric shock treatment. In Vinkel’s view those kinds of tactics were tantamount to admitting defeat, but then he wasn’t in the habit of criticising his juniors if there was no absolute need to. If the desired results were not achieved, for example… An American president had once said that he who can, does, and he who cannot, teaches. Those Americans had hit the nail right on the head on that point, at least.

  It’s hard to say how many of us had one of those people who was prone to corpulence but otherwise in good shape situated somewhere on the outer edges of our social circle, but it’s safe to say that plenty of us did. The kind of person you might meet at a distant relative’s wedding and talk to at length about fishing, or at some garden party, where he somehow popped up quite unexpectedly, but was very welcome because of his barbecue skills. Or because he could expertly explain why the Zhiguli 07 was a significantly better car than the 05. Some of them might have sailed for a hobby, or gone with their wives to the Sõprus cinema, followed by Gloria restaurant. Because they had their lives to live as well, did they not? They somehow had to exist in the same world as the rest of us – to eat, love, sleep and shit. To yearn and to fear. But where did they come from? How did they explain to themselves who they were, and justify what they did? Surely they had to explain it in some way? A more disturbing question is what these people would have done if our history had turned out differently, more happily. The majority of them would still have been here somewhere, wouldn’t they? It can’t have been that the Soviet system, which held so many people in fear, could have survived for so long just because a sufficient number of our fellow citizens were moral scum, cynics, sadists and dregs of society, who desired nothing more than to cut their betters down to size. Because it’s surely not possible that those people who had a much better idea of what was going on, certainly more than an orangutan’s inkling, could have seriously believed what was written in the textbooks of scientific communism.

  Or did they largely mix with their own kind? Believing that they were somehow cut from a better cloth. They probably had neighbours, but not friends? Perhaps they were proud of their own professionalism and thought that even if the system which they were helping to keep afloat was not ideal, it was at least preferable to the chaos which would inevitably ensue if it were not for them? Or maybe it was all a kind of rough sport for them, a che
ss game against invisible opponents, with human fates at stake instead of chess pieces. Or were they really of the view that the rulers of this world were incorrigible brutes and pigs, much the same wherever you went, and that it was a mistake to believe that some leaders could be better than others according to some kind of objective principle: that was just the honeytongued propaganda of the enemy. The Russian authorities, which have always brazenly plundered the country’s riches, silencing any opposition with a heavy blunt object, have systematically tried to convince their smarter citizens of that point, and they do so to this day. Everyone else is at it, so why not me too, or so the logic goes. And if it repeatedly proves necessary to slam some confused citizen’s fingers in the desk drawer, it might not be pretty, but there’s nothing else for it. Could it even be that when a security operative gives up some part of his humanity in the name of the common good, he is making a tough but benevolent sacrifice which releases him from any higher-order responsibility?

  Or maybe they didn’t give it much thought so long as they could keep their cosy jobs and put bread on the table. I don’t know.

  Unlike many of my older colleagues my encounters with the KGB were only fleeting. They tried to recruit me a couple of times at university. One time I expressed myself a little too frankly to my fellow students and one of them reported me, so I was invited to the Komsomol Committee where I was presented with various denunciatory letters, including from people whom I’d considered to be friends. But I was already expecting that, since quite a few of them had come to see me about it beforehand. They told me that they’d been forced into it, but that they’d tried to write in such a way that nothing too bad would come of it. Others kept quiet. One of them refused to write anything, although he didn’t tell me that himself; I found out later from other sources. Maybe because the person who reported on me was his roommate. I was seriously afraid, because the man who conducted the correctional discussion with me was known to be connected to the KGB. Although it seemed that my case was initially just an internal matter for the university, and my academic supervisor stood up for me. At that time our department was headed by a very elderly Jewish professor who had spent her best years in a Stalinist labour camp, where she’d been sent after the regime had executed her first husband. He was a Japanese communist who had somehow ended up in the workers’ paradise and was naturally accused of being a spy by the paranoid Soviet authorities. By now she’d remarried and after that incident I started to be a frequent guest at her pleasant home; I still have some of the old editions of Japanese classics which she gave me. But that’s another story. The KGB recruiters wouldn’t leave me in peace, and I had to endure a couple more conversations like that during my university years. The last one to try was someone who introduced himself as Valent Kirilovich (name unchanged) from the KGB headquarters on Liteyniy Avenue in Leningrad, who had an intellectual demeanour and an athletic build. In the end he had to content himself with me writing down his phone number and promising that I would call if I ever felt like talking. Of course we both knew I wouldn’t. I only saw him once after that, when Rosita and I were travelling by metro in St Petersburg (we were not yet married, but she already knew all these stories). We were sitting facing the doors and there he was, boarding at some station somewhere in the middle of our journey, and then standing at the end of the carriage. I tried not to look in his direction. After a couple of stops he got off.

  “You know who that was?” I started to say.

  “I know,” Rosita replied.

  But unfortunately your file follows you wherever you go; you can’t escape it. After I finished university I worked as head of the literature section at Tallinn Puppet Theatre for a few years. One day my desk phone rang and a male voice introduced himself, in Russian, as a member of staff at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and said he would like to meet me because I spoke Japanese and a few other foreign languages. I said that I wasn’t interested, my field was the humanities, and commerce and industry were foreign to me. “What do you mean you’re not interested?” he asked, getting worked up. “We could even send you abroad for a bit … we only want a quick chat, what could you have against that?” I’d already had some contact with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, but for some reason he didn’t know about that; evidently information didn’t travel so well there either. I’d once helped out on a visit of some prospective investors from Japan who were interested in the Mistra carpet factory. So I remembered meeting one member of staff from the chamber and I knew that they had quite a different manner. But I didn’t say that to the man who was talking to me in Russian, and so he simply told me an address and the time I was expected there. When I approached the place, which was up on Toompea, I spotted a Volga car parked a little way from the front door, with the engine running and three men sitting inside. I reckon they were waiting for me. But I managed to quickly slip in through the door and head to my acquaintance’s office, who knew nothing of a supposed meeting with me, and thought that I might have been lured out of my house so that someone could burgle me blind – such things were known to happen. I asked her to call me a taxi, and when it arrived at the front door I ducked into it and drove off. The Volga didn’t follow.

  In brief

  This is me, right here and right now: I am a fifty-three-year-old man, husband and father of two. I am overweight, and from time to time I try to do something about it, but then I stop bothering again. I still take an interest in what is going on in the world. I have been lucky in life, I know that. I am surrounded by people whom I love. I enjoy my work, and my salary is sufficient. I have seen the world. My family wants for nothing. It is people just like me who think up those theories about us living in the best of possible universes – even if there is a lot of unfairness, there could be much more if things were different. I have plans, and I hope to fulfil them. I still feel happy when someone I don’t know praises something I have done, and I am sad if one of my friends tells me honestly that he thinks that my work is not up to standard. But I would rather be sad than live without those kinds of friends.

  So then, I soon got another call from that man, and I recognised him by his voice again but this time he introduced himself as a member of staff from the State Security Committee called Oleg Makin (name unchanged), and said that he would like to discuss some matters of mutual interest. And perhaps I could suggest a café where our meeting might take place.

  I said that he could come to see me at work at the Puppet Theatre. And so they came. Before they arrived I told everyone that if they wanted to see some real live KGB operatives, they would have a chance to very soon.

  There were two of them. Both of them were wearing long leather coats. Oleg Makin and an Estonian who introduced himself as Viktor. Maybe his name really was Viktor, who knows. They didn’t have anything on me, although obviously they raised the subject of anti-regime views right away, to which I just said look at the newspapers, comrades: it was already 1987 and Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were in full swing. So the only thing that they could throw at me was that I’d discerned the Party’s new line before the Party itself. Then they told me that young people sometimes get carried away and need protecting against their own passions, and who better than the KGB to provide that service, as long as we know who, what, where and how. So it wouldn’t be a bad thing to meet at some café from time to time, because it’s good for us intellectuals to talk now and then. As we spoke various actors from the Puppet Theatre looked in through the door intermittently and giggled, which really annoyed my interlocutors. Eventually they realised that they weren’t going to get anything from me.

  I saw Viktor several times again some years later, after Estonia had regained independence. He was working as a security guard and doorman at one of the embassies in Tallinn, a job which consisted of letting in people one by one from the queue for visas of dozens if not hundreds standing in the corridor. I had no idea whether the embassy knew about his record of public service, nor was it any of my busin
ess.

  But I saw him, and I knew that he knew.

  And he saw me, and he knew that I knew.

  Nowadays we talk about grass-roots organisations, local committees, neighbourhood watch.

  Nowadays we would say: why don’t you set up a nonprofit organisation, apply for project funding, get yourself a website, you’re bound to get some interesting proposals.

  But back then it was simply called the youth recreation room, under the auspices of the district housing service. Because of course it had to be administratively “under” something, and be given a name, to make it official.

  The explanation was actually somewhat simpler: two fathers had been wondering what to do about their increasingly unruly children, and so they decided to roll up their sleeves and tidy up the large cellar under the house, which basically belonged to everyone and no one. They used all the means at their disposal and equipped it with a billiards table and carom board, and some other board games which didn’t take up much space, like chess and draughts. And two pairs of dumb-bells: one quite light, the other heavier. And a medicine ball. Against one of the walls they put a bookshelf with back issues of the magazines Thunder and Youth.

  Those were actually pretty decent magazines.

  And so the unruly children now had a place to go. As did their friends. And sometimes their friends’ friends. There was the usual smell of damp and plaster in the cellar, but that didn’t bother them. It was more important that no one was checking up on them. And they kept order in their territory themselves: once when two of the newer boys produced two bottles of Azerbaijani fortified wine from their school bags, they were politely asked to leave and never show themselves there again.