by Adam Thorpe
How far is St Petersburg? Not much more than a hundred kilometres, apparently. Everything close, these days. Finland just over the water. Riga.
Somebody has written in black felt pen on the painted rail I am gingerly leaning on, looking out at my favourite view: Grab My Pretty Tits. I picture the easyJet flight as a kind of sewage pipe, polluting the city with my country’s effluent.
I stop by at the music shop and buy a sheaf of blank score-paper and a good dark pencil. I tell the owner – who recognises me from six years before – that I have fallen off a bicycle. The owner has aged drastically in the interim, his shaggy hair and beard turning completely white. But his eyes are still young.
I’ll get to know him well, I think.
After a bad last night (the trains shovelling sleep to one side), I am on the coach and happier. I feel very emptied out and simultaneously very much on a high, as if I’ve consumed nothing but brown rice and water for a week.
It is the same rattly coach, and it is full. All I have is a battered rucksack and, straining it inside, the junior cricket set. The withered old woman next to me, in a spotted scarf, offers me a slice of black bread. The countryside looks much the same, flat and green and just as empty. A huge abandoned factory turns slowly in the distance, its filthy concrete slivered by barbed wire and covered in graffiti. I never noticed it, last time. Maybe I was nuzzling Kaja’s neck, at that point. Each time I breathe deeply, my rib grinds. It’s a reminder not to wander from my course.
The ferry boat serves black tea and I sip mine in a corner, wondering who I am and what I am doing. The lorry drivers keep looking at me from the opposite table; one of them wears a singlet on which is written, I Am Fucker Champion If You Ask. I don’t think I’ll bother to ask.
Then I remember what I am doing, and feel better.
The Soviet-era coach station, slapped up in unevenly pointed brick, is unchanged. It’s only a ten-minute walk from the estate where Kaja’s mother still lives, and I am half afraid of meeting her when I go into the centre of town for a bite to eat. It is very calm on the square. An estate agent’s window in one of the low, Swedish-era houses advertises dachas and plots of building land that are relatively cheap – but not that cheap. I expected better.
Some of the photos show nothing but a grassy field, distant reeds, windswept trees and sky, each snap’s colours faded by the sun. I stare at these for some time.
I buy a new map of Haaremaa. It’s dotted all over with the at sign, showing where you can hitch up to the Internet. Otherwise, apart from one wider road in the south, a dual carriageway for a few miles, it’s just the same.
I spend half an hour after lunch sitting on the artificial beach in the shadow of the castle, watching some young locals playing basketball. The brisk wind still makes hooting noises in the metal posts.
Setting off for the dacha with the rucksack on my back, I look like an ordinary hiker in the dark blue trekker’s jacket I found on eBay.
It is cool, grey April weather, which I appreciate. I feel really calm and clear, inside. I walk up the wide country road, turning off when I recognise the right yellow sign. The lane winds like an English country lane, the spring vegetation starting to crowd up on each side, the air full of the sea and wet leaf mould and sap. I begin to feel pretty good. I begin to feel exhilarated, ideas leaping about in my head, fragments coming and going over the urge to turn them into something huge and improbable.
I approach the dacha at twilight, after taking a detour up a path that Kaja and I walked a few times. It’s a long, winding path that ends where the cranes nest somewhere lonely and lovely near the waterline. I hover there by the reeds for an hour or so, listening to the sounds as I have never listened to sounds before. I wish the sun would come out, because it is cool and grey, but then I close my eyes and just listen.
The dacha is much the same, to my surprise.
The house itself is in darkness: Kaja always said that her parents never stayed after dark unless they were spending the night. The vegetable garden looks messier than I remember, and the big, wild plot next door is now a mown lawn with water features, gnomes with fishing rods, meticulous flower beds. Its owner – maybe the son of the old dead couple – has replaced its shed-like dacha with something that wouldn’t look out of place in Hayes, and its security lights are blazing.
The hen run is still in place and, from the soft chortling sounds in the coop, still full of hens. I’m tempted to look for an egg, but it’s too dark. I scurry as softly as I can on the far side of the long plot down to where the woodshed looms.
The cage is in the same position. A shadowy presence inside makes scuffling noises as it paces. I feel afraid of it, suddenly. The yellow eyes catch whatever light makes it down here from the neighbour’s dacha; they look malevolent, like a psychotic’s eyes.
I fish for my cutters in the rucksack and then fumble for the wire that fastens the cage door in the darkness. The animal stops pacing and crouches down at the end of the cage, treading on its feeding bowl. Whenever Mikhel fed it, six years ago, it crouched in the same way, as if used to being punished, and never made any attempt to escape. It’s crafty, I think: it knows it would be useless to try.
Now, as I swing the cage door open, I feel that this is the moment the fox has been expecting after so many years. It always knew this moment would come. It has never given up on the notion that one day the door would be left open and no one would be there to beat it back.
I step carefully away for a few yards, waiting on my heels by the fresh new leaves of the potato plants. I can smell the cut wood in the woodshed, reminded of the sauna and the sweet thrashing of the birch twigs, of how paths diverge and meander and cross again. My rib bothers me and I straighten slightly. They might have killed me. They might have kicked my eyeballs out. They’ll be sent back to live another day, perhaps chastened, perhaps not. The police shrugged when I said I didn’t want to press charges. In one sense, I had provoked it. It happens every night in Hayes. Now I’ll have to let it sink into the silt of everything else that has happened to me.
I sense the bulk in the cage – really, just a blacker shadow – rise and move, sniffing at the open door. The forest is not fenced off: the fox is about four paces from the forest’s safe darkness and might slip into it in seconds. I think I see the glisten of teeth, the wet muzzle, the eyeball.
I wonder if I shouldn’t urge the fox out, but decide against it.
Eventually – aware of my own sweat, the rustle of my clothes – I realise I might have to go before the fox can escape.
I might just have to trust that the fox will, at some point in the long night, find the courage in itself to leave where it has been for good and slip away into the great and complex darkness beyond.
I tramp about the island for five days, sleeping on the long and empty beaches or in barns. It’s very cold at night, despite my mountaineer’s sleeping bag, and the rustle of the waves keeps bothering me. I’ve not seen many people, find the odd shop for supplies in the lonely, modern-looking villages, grow very used to trees and getting wet. I also have stomach ache, probably from the radical change of diet, along with a shivery background suggestion of flu. I send postcards to my father and to a few friends including Howard, but not to Mill. I don’t mention the beating-up. My rib hurts less when I breathe deep, and my stitches have dissolved. My nose is fractionally, even invisibly different, like the difference between Rex and Lance.
One morning – the third day, I think – I wake up among trees feeling sick and am fairly worried about delayed concussion, being a hypochondriac. But the sickness goes and I hurry out of the wood towards somewhere nearer people, out of my own silence, out of the fear of death.
I come across gun emplacements, tangles of barbed wire, mysterious concrete lumps in the middle of woods. This gets to me. There are very few cars on the wide grit roads, but each time I hear one coming I expect it to slow down, anticipate a cry of recognition. I half expect to bump into Kaja whenever I go into
a village. I think a little boy by the shelves of sweets is Jaan. One day, quite suddenly, I break out of a straggly spruce forest to find myself facing the bareness of an alvar, stretched all the way to a glimmering strip of sea. It might be the same lichen-patched alvar we crossed six years ago, treading so carefully over the delicate habitat, when Kaja said how each life is an alvar, as if she was anticipating everything between us. Maybe the winds have blown it even barer, as they’ve half drowned stunted pines in sand off the beach in another place I think I recognise.
I am beginning to talk to myself, in a low, hushed monotone. I can watch a bird faffing about in the undergrowth, or a beetle on a twig, or the waves curling and sighing against the white sand for rather longer than I’ve watched anything before, not counting films, or concerts, or a computer screen, or Milly’s face in sleep.
One night I sleep by a stream and in the morning, very early, from first light, I do something that I remember Cornelius Cardew suggesting in his little book, Scratch Music: ‘Tune a brook by moving the stones in it.’ I spend at least two hours tuning the stream, the stones large enough to make a difference, released from the gravelly bed with a sucking reluctance, displaced to change the music of the water.
I tune it to A, in the end. My hands get so cold I can hardly move them. I stay all day by the stream, composing, scribbling on the scoresheets I bought in Tallinn, sharpening my pencil on my Swiss army knife and scribbling again. That night, I dream of the dark wispy scorelines of wrack on the white beaches and try to read their music before the foam takes them.
At the precise hour Grey Days is being broadcast on Radio 3, I hear it in my head, sitting alone in long grass on an island in Estonia, with the stream’s music moving through and over and beneath.
By the time I arrive on Kaja’s mother’s doorstep, then, I look less London-bleached, less urban. In fact, I’m looking pretty messy. There’s hay in my hair and sand in my nails. I am wearing what were called, in my youth, bovver boots. My rucksack is ex-army and frayed – I’d not wanted to go about looking like something in a photo shoot. It bulges awkwardly: the junior cricket set only just fits inside, along with the sleeping bag. Above all, I’ve let my stubble develop, and it turns out to be brindled. The only music I’ve heard – aside from piped radio in the local stores – has been provided free by the wind. My injuries are evident, if fainter. My ear is almost back to normal, retrieving the blueprint from the bloodied lump it was.
I had hoped to spend weeks as a tramp, but five days is plenty.
There’s a large bright hypermarket on the corner near the estate – I can’t even recall what it’s replaced. Waste ground, maybe. Wooden sheds. I wonder if this is the one built by Kaja’s ex-husband. I go inside and buy chocolates and a bottle of wine. It’s even more basic than Lidl, but brighter and newer-looking. It cheers me up, which it shouldn’t do.
‘Hi,’ I say, as the apartment door gives way to Kaja’s mum. ‘It’s Jack. I’ve come to see you.’
Kaja’s mother pulls a face. She looks quite a bit older. I suppose I must look quite a bit older. I grin amiably, holding out the chocolate and the wine.
‘Is that OK? I’m on holiday.’
I don’t know how much she knows. It is a gamble. Jaan may even be with her. Or Kaja. I am improvising. I am walking and not looking where I am going, trusting to where I have just been.
‘OK,’ says Maarje, brightening. ‘Welcome, welcome.’
The flat is just the same, except that there are more family photographs dotted about. A framed portrait of Mikhel stands on the kitchen table, as if she’s just been studying it. The television is on, with poor black-and-white reception, showing what appears to be a badly dubbed American cop series set somewhere like Chicago. Maarje pulls out a chair in the kitchen and I sit in it; I’m glad it makes the same squeaky sigh as before. She makes coffee and fishes out some of her factory’s buttery biscuits, hardly speaking. When she does, it is comments about the weather, all but using up her limited English vocabulary. I want her to switch the television off, but she doesn’t, and I’m distracted by the nervous-sounding dialogue, the pulse of the talking music, the violence. I ask no questions, merely make inane, polite observations about the island, the flat, the coffee. We’re padding around each other. We both know that someone is missing. Two people. Three, if you count Mikhel.
The oilcloth on the table, rippled by heat-rings, gleams from being obsessively wiped. The flat smells of loneliness.
‘On holidays? Walk?’
‘Yes. What a beautiful island.’
‘Weather not so …’
‘It’s fine,’ I insist. ‘It’s really perfect. Not too much rain.’
Maarje laughs. ‘A miracle! What’s your … hurt?’ she adds, touching her own nose and forehead.
‘Oh, just fell off my bicycle. And how’s Kaja? And Jaan?’
Maarje studies her coffee cup. ‘I dunno,’ she says. ‘Maybe you not see her.’
‘How do you mean? That I mustn’t see her?’
‘Yah. You are Jaan’s …’
I nod.
‘Now Toomas,’ she says, with a kind of resignation to it. ‘Toomas is his pappa. Jaan beautiful boy. Live here when Kaja study. No problem. Is nice for us. Now Mikhel… Oh, yes. I very sad. Even his – in the – the animal… in the dacha …’
‘His fox?’
‘Yah. Even she go. Someone come. She – out. Kill.’
‘Kill?’
Her fingers make little steps across the table, then take off to flick a strand of hair away from her eyes, then make grabbing movements while her upper lip shows her teeth in a vague snarl. I nod, looking concerned. I’m not sure what she means – that the fox was killed by some wild beast of the island? A lynx? I pull a face, as if I understand. Her rheumy eyes film over, but I don’t feel any guilt. In fact, I feel glad. Better a quick death than that intolerable imprisonment. A few days’ tramping has left me, not with mystical inclinations, but a hard, practical nub. I wonder if Kaja lives very near. Maybe not. Although nowhere is very far on this island.
In six years, Maarje has stepped over the threshold into old age. This is vaguely annoying, as if it’s all her own doing.
‘So,’ she goes on. ‘Now Toomas, very good man, her husband – he look after Jaan. Kaja happy – work for radio.’
Her eyes are shining, turning moist.
‘Beautiful girl,’ she adds, with a sigh.
I nod all but imperceptibly: I am here for Jaan, not for anything else.
‘I thinking a lot, here,’ she goes on. ‘Too much thinking.’
‘Brooding, in English.’
‘Broa-ding?’
‘Brooding. I could give you English lessons.’
She laughs, again. ‘Very good!’
‘It’s hard on your own,’ I say, pleased to be getting on with her so well.
She gets up with a grunt to make more coffee. The cop series has finished and it’s now the adverts. A blonde, laughing woman scattering Estonian washing powder over a lawn; a red car racing through an Italian piazza; a varnished McNugget trifling with the nation’s new health.
My eyes find solace in a recent, glossier photograph of the family, taken in front of the lighthouse I saw on my tramp, right out on the end of a spit of rock. A foursome, counting baby Jaan in a pushchair. Mikhel, much the same, except he’s got glasses. Next to this photo there is a close-up of Kaja, with a studio glaze about it, looking fourteen or fifteen. That was there before, I’m sure of that, but now it looks different.
She’s smiling, but it isn’t quite Kaja’s smile. There are no dimples and one of her front teeth is slightly overlapping the other. She is dressed in something neat and dutiful, with a white collar. Otherwise, yes, it is the same Kaja. But not quite the same, not under the studio lamp, the fine lens, the glossy detail. I frown. She looks ordinary, not striking. And then I remember how people change in just a few years, how this is not Kaja at twenty-seven, but at the dawn of her adulthood.
&nb
sp; Maarje is breathing heavily, head bowed a little, holding the framed photograph of Mikhel. She has a handkerchief over her nose. She is silently crying: the tears are darkening the cotton.
‘Mikhel, half of month, very bad. Very, very bad. Blood from inside. Then nothing. Just cry in sleeping. Then white and he sleep for always. Like TV off.’
The male announcer on the screen is laughing, holding up a huge repro banknote in euros.
Maarje lets me accompany her to Mikhel’s grave, next to her father’s and her pan-wielding mother’s; her great-uncles are buried in separate war cemeteries. It is ten minutes on foot: a small lumpy graveyard under cedars on the edge of town. She goes there every day. The wet grass makes squeaky noises as we tread on it, but there is no path. The dates are clear on the plaque: 1940–2003. There are plants in pots, and a spray of tiny withered flowers picked from the spring verges. I know the spray is Jaan’s little offering, even before Maarje tells me.
‘Very close. Yah. Jaan put flower. Is better.’
‘Much better,’ I say, moved by her grief, by the reminder of my own.
Maarje snuffles, and I place a tentative hand on her shoulder. Roughly the same sort of shoulder as my own mum’s.
We’re a right pair, both of us, audibly snuffling away by the graves.
I can feel the flame rise in me again – that desperate need to see Kaja, to be with her.
But I am here for Jaan, not Kaja. I have to keep reminding myself of this. I am not quite there yet.
There are yellow crocuses on the grave, as on my mum’s – and those pretty star-like flowers I can never remember the name of.
Kaja lives about twenty minutes by bike from her mother, in an old, thatched place originally belonging to Toomas’s farmer-uncle, and which Toomas has spent the last six years restoring. I can borrow Mikhel’s old bicycle, to get there.
But first, Maarje insists on me having a shower. Like a proper tramp, I have no change of clothes.
