Tallinn newspaper warnings slammed us in thick headlines but could not disguise the extraordinary. Gorbachev flying to Bonn and acknowledging the freedom of all European states to choose their rulers. Counter-attacking, the Stasi ordering barricades against the West, doubling the defences on the anti-Fascist barrier, the Wall, while street violence paralysed transport and electricity. Leipzig was in uproar, a general strike immobilized Czechoslovakia, accompanied by angry slogans from the French Revolution, its own bicentenary celebrations making topical the seizure of the Bastille, invasion of a palace, lynching of ministers. Agitation was fermented at news of the Chinese People’s Army shooting down young democrats in Tiananmen Square. The Lithuanian Reform Movement, Sajudis, despite militia bullets, was parading for democratic independence and distributing lists of the deported, tortured, shot. The Latvian Popular Front risked proclaiming imminent secession from Russia.
At the Hotel Splendide, Russian heavies, silent, glum, heard that the Estonian Civic Committee, created almost overnight, had reiterated over a secret radio that no nation could be guilty of reneging on what it had never agreed, that the 1939 Secret Protocol signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop was illegal, that Estonian independence had been guaranteed by Lenin himself. A general, shouting that God had spoken and given believers wings, jumped from a lofty window and survived, uninjured.
Soviet patrols still guarded key centres, tensely, fortified by assurances that Russian tanks would soon relieve them.
That autumn, with a crash that shook the world, the Berlin Wall was stormed, East German Party dictatorship punctured. In turbulent Bucharest, Ceausescu decreed martial law, but the army sided with the rioters. I almost expected a postcard from Alex, gleefully recounting the brute’s exclamation when his wife, pitiless Elena, was led to the firing squad, ‘But she’s a graduate!’
In Ragnarok, twilight of gods and monsters, the ancient writ had sounded:
Unknown fields
Will fill with fruit,
All will be healed,
Baldur will return.
4
The monolithic Soviet state, even to expert political forecasters, had appeared immovable. Now, as the Eastern Bloc collapsed, Moscow itself was shaky.
In Tallinn, counter-attack by the pro-Russian National Salvation Committee was suppressed, and, on Christmas Eve, Edgar Savisor, whatever his private convictions, broadcast to the nation, ‘We know that war will not free us from the Soviet Union. Nor can money buy deliverance. Only wisdom and shrewdness.’
For the first time since 1941 the Christian Maple ousted the Soviet New Year Fir. Few were unmoved by the Kremlin’s sudden admission of the invalidity of the Secret Protocol.
Formal Baltic independence must be very near, despite threat of economic sanctions, blockade, even Red Army intervention. Nevertheless, Soviet military, hitherto stiff, with jungle-cat menace, were attempting joviality, joining the rest of us at television or bar-side radio. Estonians, too, were relinquishing suet impenetrability, jerking out sardonic jokes about communism and capitalism as techniques, rival but identical, to deceive, impoverish and boast.
Censorship lapsing, new dailies appeared, and old-style politicians emerged from cellars, sewers, barges, woods, into crisp, snowy air. Ideas were mangled in cafés, where we heard of the deaths of Irving Berlin and Samuel Beckett, the American President’s dislike of broccoli, the demise of apartheid, British acid-house raves, then, from a dozen capitals, the announcement that the Cold War had ended.
Notwithstanding this, my dreams, drained of sexuality, were of Soviet Terror, bears with swollen eyes and razor claws, cut-throat gangs, for Russians had invaded Lithuania, were attacking Vilnius, corpses piling around Television Tower. Another report, sedulously detailed though untrue, was of the assassination of the Latvian Minister of the Interior.
Tallinn remained quiet, though purposeful. In January, with Baltic revolts crushed, Gorbachev unexpectedly flew to Vilnius, watched by immense crowds, utterly silent but, he would have observed, not apathetic. That night he broadcast, emphatic but ambiguous. ‘My fate is linked with the Baltic Republics. I pledge myself to resolve certain mutual obligations and explore the rights of secession.’
This was largely ridiculed by nationalists as pap for the United Nations and the European Union, but before departure he aroused some street applause, not noisy but hopeful.
Expectation was all, a dusty jewel emitting random flashes. By summer, with Marxist obdurates abstaining or fled, the Supreme Estonian Soviet, to crashing cheers and in collusion with Lithuania, declared the restoration of full independence. Red dissidents attempted a march but were howled off by the populace, supported by the KGB itself, which forthwith abandoned its prisons and offices, their doors already painted ‘Sty for Sale’. The giant watch-tower zone on the Gulf of Finland bloodlessly surrendered.
For two tense days we awaited reprisals from Red battalions still stationed at ports, air bases, industrial centres, but they stayed in barracks. Back in Moscow and in another mood, Gorbachev threatened economic sanctions, withdrawal of supplies, even bombs, but hesitated at hostile reactions from the United Nations.
Tallinn, Tartu, Narva hoisted national banners, and no commissar or general stirred. History was pausing only for fresh breath. Popular fronts were swearing to defend the Baltic Way, the international press repeating Savisor’s invective against what he had long defended but now denounced as ‘the Criminal and Unlawful 1939 Pact’.
Yet, despite Red Army immobility, rumours of coercion persisted. Frontier conflicts, long-range bombers assembling outside Leningrad, Kremlin admission of bloodshed at Baku, where ethnic dissent fermented secession movements throughout Azerbaijan, all incited nationalists and ex-communists to coalesce, with reckless demands for a congress of fifteen Soviet Republics, then declared the formation of a Baltic Council, briefed to demand the removal of all Soviet troops and the ratification of Baltic independence.
Ignoring this, Moscow confessed ‘strategic withdrawals’ in East Germany and Poland, though, more prominently, reporting drug-smuggling in Florida, persecution of Cubans seeking protection from Castro, British and Israeli subsidies for Kashmiri communal hatreds, Manchester prison riots.
At a Kremlin warning of a Red Putsch in the Baltic, thousands from the three republics massed on their Russian borders, had already formed the Great Chain, unarmed but determined, hands clasping in the intoxication of cohesion and victory.
Without deliberate decision, still believing myself neutral, I found myself amiably conscripted by a carload of young Estonians, drunk but eager to reach the Chain. Amongst faces bricklike, clerkish, sentimental, I had my hand held tight by a drowsy girl, resigned, without much caring, to whatever might come.
Under blue, empty sky we faced a treeless horizon. Patriotic songs were everywhere, liquor and unlikely stories swapped, good cheer abounding.
‘You’ll need these shoulders. Don’t break ’em.’
This from a girl, athletic in rust-coloured corduroy, yellow scarf, sailor’s round cap; high-cheeked, pallid, with serious grey-blue eyes. Her rough speech would have drawn condescension from High Folk.
She grasped my arm. ‘I’m Eeva.’ Reluctantly, I surrendered my own name, fearing suspicion. But her eyes went shiny with incredulity, astonishment. She almost gasped. ‘But you’re famous!’
Surely some laborious native humour, but before she could explain her sturdy self-possession went shy, and she hurried into introduction to her friends. They were friendly, some grateful for my imaginary deeds, saluting my spurious repute. Puzzled, I smiled, accepting drink, little cakes. An old woman, leathery, runic, kerchiefed, paused before us and, as twilight spread and many settled down to rest, she thrilled me with words heard so often at the Manor. ‘Good night. Sleep with angels.’
All was warm and starlit. Thousands slept on grass and scrub, volunteers kept guard. Transistors awoke us with news that Russia was silent, surely awed by the Great Chain. Coffee was handed me from all side
s, Eeva superintending delivery of bread. Wary yet glad of the queer respect awarded me – as if John Wayne, not quite sober, had roughed my hair and growled, ‘You’ll do!’ – I was also cautious of her. She might be informer, provocateur, drug vendor, though I doubted it.
5
The Moscow Central Committee was soon to abandon one-party rule and had acknowledged the independence of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. There followed what I had never expected to witness, the dissolution of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, from Tallinn to Sofia, Lübeck to Warsaw, Moscow to Prague and Bucharest, a wreckage from a second Great Wrath. In this flush of excitement I enrolled as an Estonian citizen, though still aimless, trapped, despite the fervour and rhetoric, in an impoverished scrap of the New Europe, itself united to capitalize on Russian decline and to resist American overlordship. Party ruthlessness would, I suspected, be replaced by factional turmoil, mafia cartels, in high streets of strip bars, massage parlours, skinhead knights, impoverished student prostitutes. Overgrown cemeteries, shabby cinemas, bandstands, railway stations, neglected parks, were swarming with vivacious political auctioneers, the paraphernalia of electoral partisans, and young amateurs with paintbrushes and swabs, attacking grime and rot as gaily as they had Intourist centres, the Jean-Paul Marat factory, the granite, arrogant Catherine the Great memorial, and the archives of Spetssluzhba, the regional KGB.
Parks, we were promised, would no longer be lopped, trimmed, squared for bureaucratic tidiness, shores would be cleansed of oil-shale pollution from Soviet thermal power. Dances and a concert celebrated the renaming of Tractor Street to Street Konstantin Päts. Children cleared Tartu Mante trees of ivy. Extra trams shortened queues. More slowly, but methodically, electricity, oil, shipping were being retrieved. Pending elections, Savisor widened the franchise.
Still cautious, I yearned unrealistically not for an efficient component of European Union and NATO but for restoration of the old German Free Cities, the solid, balanced culture evoked by the young Thomas Mann. This was pipedream, but much was propitious. Russian was no longer being enforced in schools and civil service. Indigenous skills were already being subsided, not only agriculture, farming, navigation but biochemistry, laser-power cybernetics, chemistry. European combines were competing to invest in vast Estonian peat reserves, pipeline joints, welds, blast furnaces.
None of this offered me true place. Words rotted in my head. Democracy was opportunity only to test my inferiority.
Eeva. Eeva Strendermann had worked on a Russian-financed soft-porn magazine intended to distract youth from politics. Currently, she was assistant editor for a long-prohibited Social Democratic monthly. She was unemotional, practical, never fussy.
After the Human Chain festivities we met casually at a water-side eating-house, always buzzing with actors, artists, journalists. We would drink, saunter under a sky jugged with low autumn clouds, while I questioned her about Estonian affairs, until we talked ourselves into silence or boredom.
Sometimes I learnt more. Her parents disappeared under Nazi occupation, most of her friends been deported by the Russians. A few survived by translating, black-marketing, pimping, prostitution, a cousin had been killed with Forest Brothers. She herself had had a German ‘protector’ until the Pact dissolved. She could recount enormities that, from London, I had attempted vivid descriptions. The editor hanged, on accusation of printing Reval instead of Tallinn; the pastor dangled by his feet above guard dogs left unfed; the doctor handcuffed to a headless corpse. She confirmed that, unlike Red Army discipline, Wehrmacht officers could sometimes opt out of arranging or witnessing massacre …
‘I then had another. A Ukrainian.’ She was objective, the honest journalist. ‘He could be gentle. He had been trained as a Lutheran theologian.’
With early Russian defeats, she had been booked by SS Captain Jaenecke, who provided her with a hot water apparatus, gramo-phone, numerous watches and a signed guarantee of her tenancy and rations, which the returning Russians astonished her by honouring. ‘He now owns a West Berlin restaurant. I imagine very fashionable. Silks, shirt-fronts, swagger-coats. Herr Marco Millions!’
She looked severe, as if annoyed by her own disrespect, then smiled, very independent, sea captain’s daughter. ‘Well, it’s easy to rebuke. Here we say that whoever finds herself in the tiger’s mouth will seek help even from the tiger. Yes?’
After a while we were reading newspapers together, she helping me remember the language. Iceland was first to recognize free Lithuania, by summer all three republics would be admitted to the UN. Formally concluding the Second World War, Russians were evacuating Poland. Gorbachev, fulfilling glasnost, unopposed even by the British Foreign Office, admitted Soviet guilt for the thousands of Polish officers murdered at Katyn.
No more than to myself could I convey to Eeva my exact feelings for Britain, its oddities, submerged loyalties, satirical humour. With loud generosity, intolerant outbursts, its networks and fraternities, vast silent spaces, America was less subtle. I did attempt description of my own Anglo-German complexities and Manorial reminiscences. Kitchen folk, puzzled by my withdrawals to Turret and Forest, concluded that I had been born at midnight. Years later, a Montreal child informed me that, for the same reason, Mr Mandela had been born black.
She promised to drive me through forests to Lake Peipus, where Nevsky had routed the Teutonic Knights on the ice. ‘But we must wait until summer.’ Monstrous white-and-black riders, obliterated in yelling horror. Nach dem Osten woll’n wir reiten.
One riddle, like a misspelling, she had already explained. She had called me famous. I suspected mockery or abuse of my lineage. Later, in her Lower Town backstreet room, crammed with books, magazines, a computer and lit with strident nationalist posters, she surprised me by pulling out two Estonian copies of my Secret Protocol, recently published.
Usually almost colourless, her face, with its strong bones, sea-blue eyes brightened at my reaction. ‘In those times, your talks and writings got through, were cyclostyled, distributed by what American slaves called Underground Railway. We listened to you from magic London, despite difficulty.’ She grimaced at the under-statement.
‘You sounded under waves, but we heard. You cannot guess how much we felt. You told us real news. Helping us to hold on. And some of your little books came.’
Secret Protocol was well translated, quickening stock journalism into the live and urgent. Mine, yet not mine, sometimes showing fits of grace.
On a sunny day in the Bois, which promised miracles, I had wanted to revolutionize words. Reading, I recaptured a gleam of that need, though it soon faded.
Two days later we were back in the waterside café. ‘You’re clear-eyed.’ She hesitated, as if wondering whether to touch me. Instead, without pretence of flattery, she quoted my long-ago reference to Brecht, virulent communist, stacking his profits in a Geneva bank while sneering at the Swiss workers being too happy, disinclined to rebel.
‘It means this,’ she insisted. ‘There’s a commission being got together, to revise history teaching, to tell us what really happened all those years ago. Members are tracking you down.’ She grinned, reassuring. ‘You will be wanted. Your book is already in the State Library, one of those replacing the Moscow wretchedness. That you know so many of our poets …’
We were in equilibrium, between easy diffidence and possible intimacy. She was like an air hostess, tactfully managerial, reserving some distance.
One evening, in early March, cold and windy, she was cool but convinced. ‘Before your new work starts, you should take some risk. See your Manor again. Did you not admire some text about letting the dead arise and live again?’
Objection overruled. Eeva refuted my misgivings. That slight tendency to bossiness I actually welcomed, in this and more generally. She drove me to the village, wished me fortune, departed.
I hired a bed in a cottage, virtually a cabin, the landlady a widow – the land had many widows – unsmiling, with small, round, hostile goose eyes, voice litt
le more than a scratch. A displaced Norn. Wary, as though life was a disease afflicting most others, her responses sour as the taste of too many herrings. I did not risk giving her my real name; her incuriosity might be deceptive. Could she have been the girl who ran?
After a day’s reading, dozing, drinking in the old tavern, unrecognized, doubtless watched suspiciously, posing as a Canadian journalist, I hastened to Forest, where once, within sight of the Turret, I was lost in a thicket, stumbling in circles, pushing, plunging, fearful of starvation, Forest Uncle, a random shot, of Fenris Wolf and the Robber Girl’s knife.
I would not now find that thicket. Heimdal’s Grave had vanished, as if he had struggled free.
The village was unchanged: stained, barely resisting ivy and lichen, kitchen ranges still consumed peat, coke, pine and birch, nettles clustered on side paths, gulls still swooped over Lady Lake, home of the Marsh King and the Wild Princess. In the fields, Vlodomir cows were fewer. Crows stabbed neglected pasture. The rota was primeval, soon the mosquitoes, rooks, swifts, cranes with their whooping calls. No smashed viaduct or burnt-out staff car but the return of swallows, the cleaning of ploughs. A Moldavian poem teased, like a tune:
I saw the sun rising, the great water walking
Over the meadows.
My room was unheated, with bed narrow as a coffin, a rough crucifix, an oval-backed chair, fluted, faintly gilded, surely stolen from the Manor. In the tavern, thick-set men sat as if marbled over mugs and pipes. Genre painting from a dull phase. Their attitude to independence was muted, accepting it as seasonal change. A dour, sardonic collection, enduring, while, through a thousand years, aliens spat and tangled for supremacy, and pastors, teachers, kvass officials thrust misinformation into indifferent ears. Their fatalism was at one with heavy soil, harsh winds, brief summers, dark woods, the inevitability of tides, beasts, the Nail of the Sky. Eeva had said that Estonians preferred Bears to Wolves, joking that under the Russians you merely died.
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