The Death of the Perfect Sentence

by Rein Raud

  Alex was quite happy with vodka and juice. He felt a little uncomfortable, which was probably why he’d already downed a few drinks and was a bit flushed, but that also may have been due to the crush of people. He didn’t know anyone here apart from the Lenbumprom (Leningrad Paper Industry) people, but he couldn’t be bothered to talk about work stuff – he could talk about that to his heart’s content back home in Leningrad. He’d managed to exchange pleasantries with a couple of young Finns, but the conversations hadn’t lasted long as chit-chat wasn’t his strong point.

  I’ll have a plateful of food, a drink or two, and then I’ll go to my room, he thought – tomorrow is another day, after all.

  Standing in front of him in the queue was a jovial-looking older gentleman wearing spectacles who seemed to know exactly which of the snacks to take and which to leave alone, while for Alex they all remained something of a mystery. Since the man was clearly an expert, Alex decided to let himself be guided by his choices, and so he helped himself to what had probably once been some kind of sea creature, and some lumps of cheese served with pieces of an unidentifiable fruit.

  The elderly gentleman took note.

  “I take it this is your first time here,” he half-asked, half-stated and nodded approvingly in the direction of Alex’s plate. His English was a bit stiff, as is often the case with Finns, but that made it easier to understand. “Very good. Now all you need to do is choose the right wine. Come with me.”

  Alex followed him and listened as he discussed something with the barmaid in Finnish and asked her to fill a couple of large glasses barely quarter-full of lightly sparkling white wine.

  “It’s from Portugal,” the old man explained. “They know their stuff there.”

  He put his glass and plate down for a moment and took a business card out of his pocket. “Tapani Yläkoski,” he read his name out. His place of work, the research department of the Bank of Finland, was also written on the card.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Alex said in response. “Alex Sushchevsky.”

  “Let’s keep it easy and just use first names,” Tapani suggested. “To your health!”

  Alex lifted his glass. He discovered that the seafood was actually pretty good. The cheese less so.

  It turned out that Tapani had been to Leningrad several times. Both of them agreed on how rapidly things had improved there recently, and they both hoped the trend could continue.

  They decided to have a brandy in honour of that, although Tapani remained a little sceptical about what the future held.

  “We’ve seen it before, when the Kremlin runs out of options,” he said. “In Khrushchev’s day everyone was full of high hopes too. If Gorbachev takes things too far he’ll be put back in his place, that’s for sure.”

  “I don’t know,” Alex objected. “About five years back I came very close to being thrown out of university. In any case, I had already resigned myself to never being allowed abroad again. But now here I am, I’m even working in one of the new joint ventures.”

  “So what did you do wrong?” Tapani asked.

  “Oh, nothing, it was because of my uncle,” Alex said with a dismissive gesture. “He was a mathematician, internationally renowned and all that. Then he jumped ship, went abroad for a conference and didn’t come back.”

  “Is that so?” Tapani mumbled.

  “I really hated him for several years,” Alex continued. “How could he go and do something like that to us? You’ve got no idea how seriously they took that kind of thing back then.”

  “I do actually,” Tapani said with a nod. “Things are definitely better now. Has your uncle been to see you since then?”

  “He’s dead now,” Alex answered. “He had cancer. That’s why he stayed put in England, I guess. I understand his motivations of course. Not that the treatment would have been better there: we have first-class medical care for people of his standing, always have done. It’s just that he didn’t want to waste the last years of his life.”

  “I see.”

  “He left his homeland a bachelor, but he found himself a wife there in Oxford, a young one at that,” Alex said with a smile. “They travelled round the world together too.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “His wife even wrote to me,” Alex continued. “And the letter arrived pretty quickly too, only took ten days or so. She said I should come and visit her if I ever get to England. And I will, when the opportunity arises.”

  “You know what,” Tapani said. “My daughter is a journalist, I reckon she’d be pretty interested in your story. What do you think about doing an interview tomorrow? You’ll get a small fee for it. And you can talk about your joint venture, what you’re up to and all that. What do you say?”

  “I’d be happy to,” said Alex. A lamp flashed somewhere in the furthermost recesses of his mind, but he turned it off straight away. What was the big deal? So they agreed they would meet outside Kappeli restaurant the following day, and then they ordered another couple of brandies. Not exactly Akhtamar, but it wasn’t bad at all.

  Alex looked at the Finnish woman sitting opposite him and found himself thinking that she was actually quite attractive, even pretty in her prim Nordic way (if it weren’t for the ugly glasses she was wearing), but she looked so awfully naïve, like everyone else from the other side of the Iron Curtain. How could she expect that centuries of tradition, and the fears which had fed them, would disappear overnight, as if brushed aside with the edge of a palm, or that spines which were so used to stooping before their superiors would suddenly straighten and that peoples’ heads would turn out to be full of freethinking ideas? Only a few people were capable of changing like that, and it did not come naturally even to them. It was obvious that one had to proceed gradually and cautiously, without upsetting anything, without causing harm to anyone. How could she not understand that people who defended and kept this supposedly evil system artificially alive were not born evil themselves, but were, as far as they and others believed, living to perform their duty, doing their best for the good of society. They’d ended up in a dead end, of course, but people had now started to appear who could lead them out – out of the planned economy, out of Afghanistan, out of the single-party state with no rule of law. That was exactly what was happening, and the pace was head-spinningly fast for some. How could she not realise that?

  Silja looked at the Russian sitting opposite her and found herself thinking that he was actually quite attractive, even handsome, in his rough-and-ready Russian way (if it weren’t for the ugly tie he was wearing), but he looked so awfully naïve, like everyone else from the other side of the Iron Curtain. How could he believe that it was possible to reform the system from within when it was so ineffective, so completely corrupt, built on irrational and inhumane principles from the very start? To introduce freedoms into peoples’ lives, and require that they exercise them responsibly, while the fundamental things remained unchanged. It just wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible to be a little bit free, just like you couldn’t be a little bit pregnant, and you couldn’t take flight with just one wing. Because something would always get in your way: either the realisation that you have to throw off every last one of your chains to really be free, or a painful knock and loss of consciousness after colliding with the brick wall of reality. How could he not realise that?

  “Thanks for the interesting conversation,” Silja said, taking an envelope out of her handbag and sliding it across the table towards Alex.

  “Thank you, I enjoyed it very much too,” Alex replied, shoving the envelope into his breast pocket.

  Indrek spotted the girls approaching. It was evening, one of those long, sunny, early summer evenings when there was almost no one in town, and no sound other than the harsh grating of the trams as they passed by from time to time. And the occasional car. He saw the girls coming from a distance, so he had some time to observe them. It can sometimes be that the main defining feature of a person, especially a girl, is immediately apparent, even
if you can’t say exactly what it is. It’s like some sort of line, around which everything else revolves, although it is not straight, certainly not straight, and it is unique to that person, something like a DNA spiral, or the graph of a mathematical function. It would be easy to make a model of that person, as long as you had a piece of wire bent in the shape of that line. All you would need to do is add the other stuff, the flesh and bones, but that would just be a matter of finessing. This line is not immutable, but the laws which determine how it can bend and in which direction are inherent to it, contained within its curves like an electric charge. Sometimes it is apparent from a girl’s legs, for example, or you might realise that her hair is just right, not because she has decided to style it a certain way, but because it reveals this personal line of hers. Indrek knew that if all were well then this line was accompanied by a corresponding sound, conveyed in the girl’s voice. The rest was such advanced mathematics, you wouldn’t want to trouble yourself with it. Anyway, he should have got to know these girls, but that could never happen. All you need to do is look at them to realise that not only will their uncommonly beautiful personal lines never fully reveal themselves to you, but also that they are in total harmony, that they chime with one another, they reflect and overlap with each other. Because there is some rule which unifies them: for you they are completely, utterly, impossibly unattainable.

  They didn’t normally come to this part of town, but it was Helle’s birthday today and she’d invited them to Café Moscow after their art class. There were four of them: Tonja, the eldest, with her long dark plait of hair, whose every sentence hung in the air like a question, Maarja with her chiming laughter, Liisi, who was the serious and diligent one, and of course Helle herself, who was the only one to have already got into the Art Institute, and who went to the art evening classes solely to be with her old friends. This evening Helle was in a jovial mood; she’d taken a bottle of champagne to the art class, which they’d drunk right there in the yard, straight out of the bottle. It didn’t matter that it had been a little warm, and half of it had ended up on the grass after their lengthy efforts to open it. Helle had brought four painted plastic noses with her, and they were supposed to attach them to their faces with rubber bands and walk through town. As was expected Liisi refused to do so, but the other three put their noses on, took one look at each other and started guffawing. Then the laughter wouldn’t leave them, whatever one of them said it caused one of the others to burst out giggling afresh, unrestrainedly, infectiously, for no real reason. The protesters standing on the other side of the road with their serious faces and forlorn placards with slogans like “Freedom for Aare Murakas!” and “Occupying Forces out of Estonia!”, whose ink had started to run in the rain, were also pretty funny. But suddenly Maarja’s chiming laughter came to an abrupt stop. Of course she found the people there amusing, especially on a day like today, when nothing was off limits. But it still wasn’t nice to laugh at them like that. Those guys were standing there for her as well. They stood there day in, day out like a living reproach against all that was wrong with the world, and of course it wasn’t their fault that today was the kind of day it was.

  “Wait a moment!” Maarja hollered to the others and she handed her folder to Liisi. The first note she found in her pocket was a five-rouble one, which was not actually worth anything any more. She crossed the road and stuffed the note into the glass jar, trying her utmost to contain her laughter. Those funny, taciturn young people had earned it after all.

  I probably already mentioned that it was evening by now, and the road was completely free of cars.

  Damn that Raim, Indrek thought, when he saw his friend’s broad shoulders nudge forward. Some people were happy to look from a distance, but he just goes and takes what he wants (but Indrek was wrong, there was another reason for Raim’s behaviour).

  Maarja hadn’t got back to the other side of the road when one of the young men, a sporty-looking guy with blond hair, probably a few years older than she was, started to run after her.

  “Wait a moment!” he cried out, and Maarja turned round, although she wasn’t at all sure if he was addressing her.

  “Come back tomorrow,” the young man said, “I’ve got something I want to tell you.”

  That lovely girl, with her button nose, who walked as if she were hovering ten centimetres above the pavement, clearly already had plans for the evening. Anyway he was also busy, he had to go and buy a cake and some flowers, and so forth.

  But that girl could be just right for Valev’s plan.

  Like a bird’s nest

  Ever since she was little Maarja had had a strange, almost symbiotic relationship with that creaking twostorey wooden house which was the only place she had ever called home. It was as if they’d grown to be part of one another. When the rain drummed against the tin roof, she felt her hair get wet, and when the sun shone through the windows into the dim kitchen, she squinted. And the same went for the smells. It didn’t matter that the house smelt of old people, whenever she got out of the bath she felt as if those smells had faded for awhile. That was why she had always washed herself thoroughly ever since she was little, without ever needing to be told, and she washed her hair more than she needed to too. Later, after Estonia regained independence, after her parents got divorced and she was living in Lasnamäe with her mother, she always came by this house if she was in the Kalamaja area, and since there was no lock on the front door she would always peek inside. When she moved out of her mother’s place she wanted to rent a room here, but there were none available. But her memories didn’t go anywhere, and haven’t to this day. That house no longer physically exists, it was restored to relatives of its original owner who had no links to it; for them all that counted was the location. The disappearance of the house was a blow for Maarja, and it gave her no sense of release, in fact it weighed on her. Not many people would find it easy to go through life dragging a demolished house with them. But all this was still to come. For now those smells are still there, together with the rain and the sun.

  Clearly Raim did not ask where Valev had got hold of the information about Lidia Petrovna Gromova, but in the interests of clarity let it be explained. As it happened the source of that information was the same woman from the block where Lidia Petrovna lived, the one who had helped her find work in the security organs. Which had also come about by chance. A certain very handsome man used to visit this woman to comfort her during her husband’s long drinking binges and other absences. He didn’t wear a uniform, but he carried a work-issue gun with him at all times. And this woman was happy to be helpful in other ways too. One time the man told her about a well-paid vacancy, obviously hoping that she would apply; unfortunately she couldn’t type, but she knew that Lidia could turn her hand to that kind of work. Later, when it turned out that this man was only interested in getting information about her husband’s colleagues, they fell out badly. After that another man started to come round and console her. He was no less handsome, but he had completely different views, he was one of the leading figures among the local Russian nationalists. Lidia’s former neighbour was happy to be helpful to him in every way possible too. And this nationalist really liked those plump women with pale skin and a slightly motherly appearance, so they were well suited to each other. You might not believe it but back in those days the Estonian and Russian nationalists got on marvellously, united as they were by a common hatred for the Bolshevik regime – although the Estonians believed that the Soviet occupation which started in 1940 was a much worse crime than the execution of the last Russian tsar and his family, as ugly as that might have been. At the necessary moments they’d helped each other out of trouble before. Moreover, the Russian nationalists thought that if copies of KGB files made it through to the West, then it would be a great help for their cause too.

  In addition to Lidia Petrovna’s name, two other names reached Valev’s organisation in the same way, but it proved impossible to make an approach to them. And the fact
that Lidia Petrovna had once worked at Raim’s school was certainly going to be useful.

  Valev knew nothing more about her. And that was for the best.

  At the precise moment that Lidia opened the door of her apartment – dressed in her dressing gown and feeling some trepidation, since her doorbell rarely rang – Raim had still not thought up the words with which to address his former Russian teacher after all those years.

  But when he saw the immediate, complete and unambiguous look of recognition in her eyes, he realised that sometimes it was not necessary to think – only to be.

  He closed the door behind him, put the cake and flowers on top of the cupboard in the corridor, took hold of Lidia’s shoulders, pulled her gently towards him, slid his hands under her dressing gown, across her naked back, and pressed his lips on to hers.

  In other words, he did exactly what he’d always wanted to do every single time he’d seen Lidia Petrovna.

  Who cares about cake when there are fingers, hair, a nose, lips, a hollow in the back, shoulder blades, buttocks, and breasts? Who cares about flowers when a warm, moist welcome beckons from between the legs, and trousers can no longer contain the urge which has been suppressed for all those long years? Fortunately Lidia managed to edge slowly backwards, guiding them into the bedroom, so that they could become one for the first time on her quilt rather than on the corridor floor. But could anyone rightfully demand greater self-restraint when every square centimetre of their flesh yearned to be pressed against the long-awaited other, pressed so firmly that it could never be prised loose? Can you ask why someone who is parched after weeks in the desert drinks so greedily that the water sloshes out from either side of the jug?