The Death of the Perfect Sentence

by Rein Raud

  “Really?”

  “Yes Li, really.”

  “My name’s not Li, it’s Lidia.”

  Raim said nothing in response, he just placed both hands on her head and ran his fingers through her hair, and her heavy thoughts melted away. Or even if they didn’t completely disappear, they at least became insignificant enough for her body to be truly ready to receive everything which she longed for.

  This time it was a bottle of pear liqueur, Xanté, which Vello produced from his briefcase.

  “What’s that?” Ervin asked in surprise. “You know I don’t go for those poof’s drinks.” He’d been on familiar terms with his contact man for some time now.

  “Of course I do,” Vello said. “This is for you to give the hosts.”

  “Are the KGB about to put on a party or something? I wasn’t aware that I’d been invited anywhere.”

  “That’s not something you need to worry about,” Vello said, and he started to explain.

  The latest talking point in the Estonian diaspora community was the recent marriage of a young man by the name of Ahto. He’d been involved with the youth league of the Swedish Social Democrat Party for a while now, and had even visited Estonia once as part of their delegation, to meet the Popular Front and help make contacts. But now Ahto had found himself a wife from the Estonian homeland. And although this girl, who was called Tiiu, came from Käsmu just like Ahto’s own parents, she already had a child by another man. Many of the Estonians in Stockholm doubted whether the marriage was a good idea, especially since quite a few of the local young ladies had their eye on Ahto. As a freedom fighter, Ervin also thought that it could be a major blunder. Tiiu herself might be fine and dandy, but hell knows who might turn up amongst her relatives, and there was nothing sensible known about the child’s father either. He could have all sorts of dodgy acquaintances. And just think, this same child would start going to the Estonian School in Stockholm in a couple of years’ time.

  But others were of the view that everyone had the right to organise their affairs as they saw best. And that no one else had any business poking their noses in. These were free people living in a free country after all. Or were they not?

  “Hang on, is that Tiiu linked to the security agencies as well?” Ervin asked. But Vello just scowled at him and carried on talking.

  Apparently Tiiu really liked Swedish pear liqueur. And Ahto now had to demonstrate that he was a proper Estonian man, so it wouldn’t be hard for Ervin the freedom fighter to get himself invited to their place if he got talking to Ahto at some event at the Estonian club.

  “And then you should definitely go,” said Vello. “And listen, when you get talking to them don’t hold back with that talk about giving the Russkies a hiding: give them all the heroic swastika stories you’ve got.”

  “OK,” said Ervin, although Vello’s request seemed a little strange. “No problem.”

  “That’s probably it for today then,” said Vello, getting up.

  “But you could at least tell me if that Tiiu is working for the security services,” said Ervin. “I’ll find out sooner or later anyway, when her file gets here.”

  “What do you mean?” Vello asked in alarm.

  “Well, there have been films containing copies of the files delivered here from Estonia for some time now,” said Ervin. “There’s a special cupboard in the archive of the Estonian House where they keep the films and printouts, in alphabetical order. Don’t tell me I haven’t mentioned it before.”

  “Damned idiot!” Vello bellowed. “Damned useless piece of shit! Of course you haven’t told me about it before, you damned shithead!”

  “No need to be like that about it,” Ervin said, getting offended. And he felt himself break out in a cold sweat.

  He hadn’t actually thought that much about it before. But now he realised that photographs of his own file could arrive any day.

  Särg had never seen Vinkel in such a rage before.

  “One of our own guys!” he yelled. “A damned rotten apple. Fuck, I’ll give him a whack myself! I’ll strangle him with my bare hands. I’ll trample him into the dirt! I’ll kick his head in, damn it! I’ll fuck him up so badly that he’ll be grateful when he’s dead!”

  “So what will we tell Kuzmich?” Ots asked.

  “Nothing, to start with.” Vinkel didn’t want to think about what would happen when their boss found out. The whole damned network of spies! Heads would roll over something like this. The first thing to do was to work out exactly what had happened, and only then report to the seniors. The men nodded, they knew the score.

  “Let’s keep it to ourselves for now. Tell Vello to keep his mouth shut too,” Vinkel added. “If that bastard realises that we know, we’ll never get our hands on him.”

  “But then the leaks will continue,” Särg said. That is if the person didn’t already know. If it wasn’t someone in that very room… Ots? Zhukov? They could just as well suspect Särg himself, especially Vinkel, or in fact anyone who knew about the Anton business.

  “Let them continue, for now,” Vinkel said with a sneer. “But now, Comrade Särg, your job is to put together a nice fat pile of agent files for them. Special editions, damn it. With lots of background history. The finest sons of the Estonian fatherland, as they say. Look about, read the papers. You could start with that damned Lennart Meri. Let them rip each others’ throats out, the fucking scum.”

  “I’m sorry, but I just can’t carry on doing it,” Lidia said. She was holding the door ajar with one hand, dressed in her dressing gown and looking older than usual. She hadn’t invited Raim in, and it didn’t look like she planned to. “I keep thinking of how that dolt caught me; the next time I won’t get off so easily.”

  After that time she’d felt feverish for several days, and hadn’t dared go close to the archive, even if she had a valid reason to do so – an obligation even. Raim eventually persuaded her to go back there. The camera was in her bag, but the first time she didn’t even dare to take it out. In fact, she decided that she would give it back to Raim the next time he came for the films. Then she took a few pictures, with her hands shaking and her heart in her throat.

  That’s enough. All things have their limit. Let him sleep with those young Estonian girls; I’m not playing his game any more. That art chick of his, for example.

  But now here he was at the door again with a twinkle in his eye, and clearly a little put out.

  “The end is in sight, Li,” Raim said. “Just a little bit longer.”

  She took a step back from the door and let him in. She might as well, things had already gone this far.

  But there was something in the air.

  Two things happened at almost exactly the same moment: Raim fell to his knees and took hold of Lidia Petrovna’s waist with both hands, pressing his nose against her belly button, towards the spot where he longed to be. And Lidia Petrovna burst out crying, crying like she hadn’t cried for years. Because once you start to cry like that, you cannot stop.

  “It’s nothing, dear,” Lidia lied between sobs, and she stroked Raim’s tousled hair, “it’s nothing serious, really.”

  They got Karl just as he stepped out of his front door to go to work in the morning. Vinkel himself had sat in wait for him, in the car with Artyem whom he’d brought along mostly as brawn. They leapt out from either side of the car, Vinkel flashing his ID.

  “I’ve got just one question for you,” he said to Karl once they’d shoved him on to the back seat. “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Karl mumbled, his face turning completely white.

  “Who is delivering information from the security services to your group?”

  “Sorry, comrade, but…”

  “That’s enough,” said Vinkel. “Don’t play the fool with me. We know it must be one of our own. We know that you know who it is. We both know that you will tell us eventually anyway. So why waste each other’s time?”

  Karl sighed.
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br />   According to the official records he will die eight years later from alcohol-related liver disease.

  In reality he was dead from that moment.

  They decided to detain her in the act, so that no questions would be asked. Otherwise she might happen not to have the camera with her that day. Some guy called Karl told you? You must be joking? In any case, it would take some time longer to find out who she was passing the material to.

  Lidia Petrovna had positioned two lamps on the table so that their beams intersected. She’d taken the first file from the stack, and looking back at her was a photo of a man who was getting on a bit, with a long face and thinning hair, and a big hearty smile. That face was familiar from somewhere. She took the camera out of her handbag, focused the lens and pressed the button.

  And at that very moment Vinkel stepped out from behind the curtain.

  I hope I never have to know how that felt.

  “So this is what’s going to happen,” Vinkel told her. “First you’re going to tell us everything you know. Then you will board a train. Have you heard of Oymyakon? It’s in Yakutia. It breaks the record for the coldest place in the world every single year.”

  Särg was sitting in his office alone – for once the stool in front of him was empty. He pictured to himself how in an hour’s time that very attractive woman would be sitting in front of him, having had some time in the cell to think things over. He didn’t know why Gromova had done what she did, but there had to be some reason behind it. There always was. He wanted to know what it was. It would be easier for him to do what he had to do if he understood what had driven the person sitting on the other side of the table.

  But now another image appeared in his mind’s eye, something which had given him no peace for the last few weeks. It was his son, sitting on the stool in front of him. Anton with two black eyes, and his eyebrow cut to bits.

  We all have our reasons for doing what we do, Särg thought to himself. He has, and so do I.

  Särg took his overcoat from the peg and left the building. It was lunchtime anyway. He walked down Pikk Street towards town – he had to find a proper telephone box, not just one of those phones fixed to the wall. The call he planned to make was not intended for passers-by to hear.

  Galina answered almost immediately in her honey-sweet tones (come to think of it, why wasn’t she at work?).

  “Get Anton for me please,” Särg said into the cold phone receiver.

  “Hello Dad,” Anton’s voice came back at him a moment later, in Russian.

  And then Särg said what he had to say so that later in life he would be able to look his son in the face, and at himself in the mirror:

  “Lidia Gromova’s been caught. In the worst case they’ll know who she was working with by tomorrow, in the best case the day after. Tell your people. Right away.”

  “Wait, but how do you…” Anton started to ask.

  “Later,” Särg said, cutting him short, “you should go now.”

  “We can’t,” said Indrek, “We mustn’t.”

  The other people sitting in the cellar were silent.

  “It’s a war,” said Raim, holding firm. “There are always casualties. We’ve got more important things to do.”

  “Are you sure you’re human?” Indrek demanded, quite angry by now. “Or some kind of fucked-up robot? Or have you decided to play God, damn it?”

  “Hold on, don’t get worked up.”

  Raim pulled away slightly. There was a sour smell coming from his friend’s mouth, accompanied by globules of spit. Raim didn’t think he was a robot. Far from it. But there was still a grain of truth in what Indrek had said. After all it had been him, Raim, who had picked up this girl and trained her to do something which could technically be classified as treason. In the eyes of the law the girl was therefore far guiltier than anyone from amongst their own ranks, which meant that if what Anton said was right, then she would find herself somewhere very cold for a good few years.

  And what kind of leader was Raim if he couldn’t look after his own people?

  What’s more he was also to blame. He had to go and mention Maarja round Li’s that time.

  “OK, I’ll see what I can do,” he said with a nod.

  There were just the two of them sitting in the steamy sauna on Raua Street, but they were talking very quietly just in case. Valev heard Raim out in silence before going to douse his head in cold water. In the heat of the sauna his face was even more flushed than usual.

  “I agree,” Valev said once he’d sat back down next to Raim and splashed some water on to the sauna stones. “We have to try something. I’ve got this one idea, although it will take a couple of days, I’m afraid. The other option would be to send her to Lithuania, of course; there’s all sorts of places to lie low there. What do you reckon, how long will Gromova hold out? How did she seem to you?”

  “A little longer, I think,” Raim said. In general he was trying to think about Li as little as possible.

  “They’re not going to show any mercy right now,” Valev said apprehensively. “Very well then, let’s leave the Lithuanian option in reserve for now. You can go there yourself if things really heat up here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Raim said resolutely. He couldn’t explain to Valev why he was fairly sure that the security services would not know the exact details of his role in the whole business. But Maarja, that was a different matter altogether, unfortunately.

  “Very well then, you know best,” Valev continued. “We’ve got one guy in the ministry, and we can call Finland too. I hope that they don’t muck around with the visa. Has she got a passport?”

  “She should have. She visited Poland just recently.”

  “Very well. Go and find her and explain the situation.”

  On this occasion Tapani called Alex himself, which didn’t happen very often, even though he knew the schedule for the Helsinki visits very well by now. Alex had only just got from the port to the hotel. He was still holding the room keys in his fingers and had just put his briefcase down when the phone started clanging. It was strange, almost as if Tapani had been waiting for him. Which made him uneasy. Especially since he didn’t have anything to give him this time. Had he forgotten that?

  But this time Tapani wasn’t interested in any films.

  “You will have to go back to Tallinn briefly tomorrow,” he said.

  “But what about the consultations?”

  “You’ll think of something. There’s someone who needs to be brought over from there right away. She’s got the paperwork to show that she’s a designer in the joint venture; she’s coming to Finland on a work assignment, let’s say.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know exactly, a young woman. Just some person like you.” Tapani seemed quite worked up. “When you get to Estonia someone will meet you and tell you where to find her, then you will whisk her straight on to the boat and back here. She’s got all the necessary documents, but she doesn’t know anything about the nature of the company’s activities. So it’s best that you accompany her, for safety’s sake. I’ll collect her from you tomorrow evening here in Helsinki.”

  “Actually I’ve got something I need to take care of myself in Tallinn as well,” said Alex.

  “Are you joking? There’s no time.”

  “So this time it is going to be dangerous then,” Alex concluded.

  “Well, yes, I wouldn’t say it’s completely risk-free,” Tapani admitted. “But if you get caught, you just play the fool, say that the Finns put you up to it, that you know nothing. She’s the one who’s got the most to be afraid of.”

  Back then everyone knew what it meant when they started broadcasting Swan Lake on the television non-stop – somewhere, something had gone seriously wrong, and even the Kremlin wasn’t sure what would happen next. Like the day after Brezhnev’s death, when no one knew who would succeed him. But this time the music sounded even more ominous, more unsettling than usual. Raim’s father hadn’t
switched the television off once, and there on the screen Odette was gasping her final gasps for the nth time. They had long stopped actually watching it, but it was still on, just in case there was suddenly some new information. But the Kremlin had already said enough that morning. That’s it. All over. A state of emergency had been declared. The military and security services were taking hold of the reins. While the little swans danced, the tanks were already rumbling down the motorway and could arrive any moment. Now there was definitely not going to be any hope of going abroad without official permission; in fact you’d be lucky if you ever managed to get out again. The best-case scenario might be a return to something like the Brezhnev era, Raim’s father contemplated, but you couldn’t rule out a new wave of deportations to Siberia and hell knows what else. Only time would tell. But at first there was no information at all. They tuned into Finnish TV now and again, but the only thing on was analysts making their assessments, trying to read the tea leaves but succeeding only in being annoying. Raim’s father was standing in front of the drinks cabinet. To mark the sad occasion he’d decided to open the new bottle of Johnnie Walker, a gift from Jorma and Outi on their last visit from Karkkila that was supposed to remain untouched a few more months, until his sixtieth birthday. So be it, today was a special day. Raim was sitting on the sofa, feeling depressed, mother was in the kitchen, and there was ice in the fridge. Raim’s father had known all too well that things would end up like this, and who was to blame? He’d always said that they shouldn’t overplay their hand, and now look, they had this mess to deal with. But today he’d decided not to repeat this point. There was no sense rubbing salt in the wounds. His son knew the truth. And somehow they would find a way, they always had done. We Estonians have lived on this territory for six thousand years, and despite everything we are still here. Life wasn’t just going to come to an end over this. Tomorrow is a new day, remember that. He’d even thought up something to say. A fine phrase for the moment when the whisky had been poured, mother came back from the kitchen with the ice, and the three of them were sitting on the sofa, raising their glasses, worried about what was to come and mourning what would be no more. Then he would say it: “To yesterday’s dreams.”