Everything is Wonderful Page 10

  Jews did not live freely in the Russian Empire. They were largely confined to the Pale of Settlement, roughly the area formerly comprising the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine, and parts of western Russia. Even within the Pale, they were not allowed to live in certain cities. Jews had not been allowed to settle in Estonia until the end of the nineteenth century. Hence before the war there were only some forty-three hundred Jews in Estonia, about half of whom lived in Tallinn.

  There was a great deal of cultural autonomy for all minorities up until 1934. Anti-Semitic materials were banned after independence, and continued to be banned under President Konstantin Päts’s mildly authoritarian regime. Nazism as a political movement was outlawed. Despite the fact that the community was so small, there was a Jewish representative of parliament, a Zionist youth movement, Yiddish newspapers, and a chair of Jewish studies at Tartu. All were destroyed after the German invasion.

  Two weeks after the invasion, the Omakaitse, the Estonian territorial army in Nazi service, started searching for hidden Jews. Most Jews had, by then, already escaped to Russia. The ones who remained were virtually all killed: only twelve Estonian Jews are known to have survived the Holocaust in Estonia, fewer than in any other country occupied by the Nazis.

  The Germans occupied Estonia for four years, from 1941 to 1944. In that time at least fifteen thousand Soviet prisoners of war were killed as slave labourers in Estonia, worked to death in camps. Alongside Estonian Jews, thousands of Jews from other occupied countries were transported to be killed in Estonia—at Kalevi-Liiva, at Vaivara, at Klooga, and other places—along with hundreds of Roma people. Some six thousand ethnic Estonians, and another thousand people described as being of ‘uncertain nationality’, were also killed by the Nazis.

  Some Estonians tried to help the Jews, notably Uku Masing, a linguist and philosopher who was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations honorific by Yad Vashem and the Israeli Supreme Court. Masing, an extraordinarily gifted man, and an expert on Semitic languages, saved the life of a friend, Isidor Levin, at great personal risk.

  And the Estonian Swedes? For them, not much changed at first. At Birkas, the curriculum of the school was altered once more, German replacing Russian and the study of the Stalin constitution. In 1943, however, the German army began to mobilise men from the Swedish-speaking community as well as from the Estonian one. The illegal flights to Sweden—which had been going on since the beginning of the war—increased dramatically then. Families, Estonian as well as Swedish, fled in small fishing boats, risking the twin dangers of the Baltic Sea and discovery by German military patrols.

  In February 1944 the Red Army began its advance towards Tallinn. In March it bombed the city, and tens of thousands of people fled. Some ended up in displaced people’s camps in Germany after the war. Some were shot, either by German or by Russian troops. Some who had fought with the Germans, or collaborated, fled to the forests in 1944, joining the anti-Soviet partisans. The Forest Brothers, active in Latvia and Lithuania as well, kept up a losing guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation long after the war, fading into a dismal existence in hiding. Soviet propaganda portrayed them as Nazi sympathisers. Swedish, American, and British secret services helped the Forest Brothers after the war, but in the end many guerrilla units were destroyed by the actions of the British spy Kim Philby, who gave MI6 information about them to the KGB. The last Forest Brother in Estonia, August Sabbe, was discovered in 1978 by a river near his former home. He drowned, possibly committing suicide, before he could be arrested.

  Collectivisation in Estonia took place in 1949. Stalin planned a preemptive mass deportation from the western borderlands beforehand, in order to weaken opposition: on 25–26 March 1949, 20,700 Estonians, mainly from the countryside, were deported. “Kulaks,” “collaborators,” and “nationalists” were the main targets. Lists were drawn up, and people were arrested and sent off to the Gulag. Few came back. All but one of the collective farms on the peninsula of Noarootsi was founded in the month after the deportations. The last one, Freedom (formerly the village of Harga), was established on 30 April 1949. The thirty-two villages on the peninsula were turned into twenty-three collective farms. Each village formerly had a Swedish and an Estonian name. The collective farms were given Soviet Estonian names: Lenin, Red Flag, Victory, Red Dawn, Hero, Red Star, New Life, Forward, New Way, Partisan, Kalinin, and so on.

  Almost all the Swedes had left by then, half the inhabitants on the peninsula. Some of their farms had been taken over by Estonians from Russia, resettled by the Germans. Those Estonians had little in common with the farmers and villagers on Noarootsi. They had grown up with the revolution and didn’t know how to live thriftily, which was essential on that poor soil, where everything was recycled over and over. The newcomers had no such traditions, and probably no genuine hope of staying or commitment to the new farms. People said that they burnt furniture and boats for firewood, and that they didn’t take care of the animals. Overall Estonian agricultural production declined dramatically—the effect of collectivisation everywhere.

  In 1950, 1951, and 1952 the small collective farms amalgamated, finally leaving only Lenin and Kalinin on the peninsula. By now the tensions between the newcomers and the original inhabitants had subsided, submerged in the cultural tidal wave of collectivisation. Collective farm centres like Pürksi were planned centrally, and were more or less the same all over the Soviet Union, with their collective dining rooms, cultural programmes, schools, and childcare. After a few years, collective farmworkers were paid small salaries—in the beginning they had to work for food, like in the feudal era. “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” In 1965 Kalinin on the peninsula and Kirov on the mainland merged into Sutlepa Kolhoos, headquartered on the mainland. In 1976 Sutlepa merged with Lenin, covering most of the peninsula and a strip of land on the mainland. Inevitably, Lenin was the first and the last. It was renamed the Noarootsi Kolhoos in 1990 and closed, finally, in 1993.

  SEVEN

  Dear Comrades

  When I was doing my fieldwork I was not as yet aware of most of the history I have just described. Not all of it was accessible yet—­President Lennart Meri set up the Estonian International Commission for Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity in 1998, which was succeeded in 2008 by the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, established by President Toomas Ilves. The Museum of Occupations opened in 2003. Much of the history was still largely unknown in 1993–94. I visited the historical archives in Tallinn to see what I could find. It was empty and quiet. A pale librarian tried half-heartedly to help me, but the place was still Soviet enough to make it a difficult process, and my Estonian was not good enough to make sense of what I read.

  That same day I went on to Rocca-al-Mare, the Estonian Open Air Museum, outside Tallinn. Soviet guides, apparently, used to tell tourists that the poor nineteenth-century wooden huts and houses were how all rural Estonians lived before the Soviet liberation, ignoring the 1920 land reform, and twenty years of thriving independent farming. Now, the museum was busy with women and children selling crafts to the few tourists. Farther away from the entrance, hidden by the old peasant dwellings, impoverished people were selling their own belongings to the few tourists coming by: cutlery and plates, cheap sweaters, old vases and lamps.

  Seeing it, I remembered St. Petersburg. I had been there two years previously, in the autumn of 1991, and wandered through the market with a Russian friend. Men and women were sitting on the street and pavement, bleakly, quietly, selling what they could. A man, his feet wrapped in rags, sat in front of a small pile of rusty nails. Next to him a man was selling small fish the Neva River, four or five of them on a cracked plate. A woman nearby was selling some broken plates. My friend walked past in silence, her pockets crammed with the contents of the minibar, and all the soap and shampoo, from my hotel room. We were walking back to her family’s flat, a relative
ly privileged few rooms from a subdivided pre-war building. She gave me tea made from water filtered, boiled, and frozen, to purify it.

  By October it was getting cold in Estonia. Tiina, the new teacher who had lived in Denmark for a year, affected not to understand why the school was so cold, or why Toivo and Inna’s flat, where she visited me, was so cold. I looked at her in disbelief, and she hastily changed the subject.

  By now I was writing long reports, divided into tentative quasi-anthropological headings: “Displacement, Comprehension, Production,” “Sanity and Representativeness,” “Gender,” “Inside/Outside,” “The Material Culture of the Home,” “Silence and Distance,” “Transience and the Extraordinary Variety of Breakfasts.” I analysed every conversation, and wrote long field notes. But sometimes the depth confused the surface. “Don’t drink that cold water,” Toivo would often say, commenting, I thought, on how much water I drank, and the difference in patterns of consumption between us. The Estonians seemed to drink nothing but coffee, tea, and alcohol. You could build an argument on a comment like that—in fact I think I probably did. Later, I found out that the kitchen water had been condemned as “not of drinking quality.” Toivo and Inna didn’t quite want to say, but nor did they really want me to be poisoned.

  Toivo got drunk on a regular basis, a periodical drinker. When he wasn’t drunk he was unhappy, wandering between the kitchen and the living room, sighing deeply, his suffering so ostentatious, and yet so existential. One drunk night he showed me his military diary, a tiny notebook filled with drawings and poems. There was an Estonian flag, crossed with a whip and a spiked club. Got uns Mit [God with Us], he had scribbled under it in broken German. To the right was an eagle—Russia—with blood dripping from its outstretched claw, beak open in an imagined hiss. There were American cars, women dancing with a devil grinning in the foreground, the legs of dancing people, and, sadly, a bottle crossed out. His friends teased him, he slurred, looking at me intently, about having a “beautiful woman” living with him, “a second wife.” He professed to love me as a “brother” and not a “husband,” but he hovered uncomfortably near me, both physically and mentally. Inna was away again—she left, usually with the children, when he drank, leaving me alone with him.

  Sometimes they tried to entertain me together. One such evening I remember because they got their old photo albums out. His were mostly from his time in the army in Novosibirsk in 1968–70: small snapshots with a brownish tint. Military service was supposed to be “an honorable duty of Soviet citizens.” An honorable duty with brutal, sometimes fatal, bullying in the ranks, directed against most minorities. The Estonians stuck together in the army. The photos in the albums were mostly staged jokes sent back to his mother, of his head sticking up from the sand, or flying through the air, looking like a tougher blond Elvis, with sunglasses and long sideburns. There was one photo of Toivo sitting with his friends on a bench in front of a concrete block on the sand, looking at a small bag of nuts from Sweden, part of some relatives’ food parcel. I looked at the Swedish peanuts—the packaging was comforting, a familiar sign, even in that black-and-white snapshot from so long ago.

  At about this time I had an accident with my car, driving over a stone on the road, two hours from the collective farm. The car ground to a halt, and I was stuck, with the hitchhiking kids I had picked up some miles back. We sat around waiting until a car with three men stopped. They examined my car for at least half an hour, leisurely discussing what might be wrong, trying to extract, with some difficulties, the precise details of the accident. Then a car mechanic from Haapsalu stopped his lorry to help, too. The men continued to worry over the engine, and finally decided that they would tow the car, with one of the men, rather than me, behind the wheel. “The power brakes don’t work so well when the engine is turned off,” one of them explained kindly, “but don’t worry, he is a good driver.” The children and I climbed into the lorry, and the other men followed. We drove to Risti, the nearest town, where the mechanic knew the local policeman, a Russian, but nevertheless deemed a decent enough guardian of the car whilst arrangements could be made.

  The policeman, holding a mangy growling Alsatian on a rope, agreed to keep the car in his yard. The men proceeded to discuss the precise location of where it should be parked in the yard, in surreal detail. The children, used to waiting, lounged about, as did I, by now barely a participant in my own fate. The position finally agreed, the parking done, the men suddenly left with the children, leaving me barely enough time even to thank them. They had already arranged with the mechanic that he would drive me home, a detour of some fifty kilometers.

  It turned out, as we chatted in his cab, that the mechanic’s mother was Swedish, though he himself didn’t speak the language. He came with me into the flat, and he and Toivo had an intense and prolonged consultation. Toivo told me to go and wait in the kitchen, and I did, by now exhausted and somewhat emotional. Erki came in, and asked in his hoarse and monotone English (I taught him) what had happened. I told him, voice unsteady. He didn’t say anything, standing by the sink, looking down, thumbing the cheap fake wood surround, his presence comforting nevertheless. Toivo and the mechanic returned, having settled on a plan, and had some coffee in the kitchen. The mechanic left, as suddenly as the others, refusing any payment before I had even offered it, Toivo nodding sagely in the background.

  Soon my car became a concern of the whole village. Kulla’s daughter in Tallinn was roped in, because she had so many “contacts,” knew so many “young men,” in Tallinn. At two she rang, saying that the car would have to be towed to the Tallinn Volvo centre. She said she would ring and get a price for the repair, and would call me back. I said not to worry, they couldn’t know the price before seeing the car, and she agreed half-heartedly. Toivo would have to arrange it with the school, she said, shouting on the crackly line that she would call me again “if she had any news.” Toivo rang Laine, who rang four people to see if they could take me, towing the car, and, finally, offered me the help of the school driver. I said I would pay for the petrol. She made an airy gesture, and said, “How nice of you, but don’t let us speak of such things.” Then she looked at me meaningfully and said that if I didn’t like it in this family she could find me another one, or I could move back to the hotel. She knew, of course, about Toivo’s drinking, but she wasn’t going to mention it.

  I should have moved out there and then: nothing good could have come of staying, particularly not for my hosts, as would soon become obvious. The car incident delayed the move, because I felt so well cared for afterwards. A short time later I accidentally set fire to the kitchen in the flat, forgetting to switch off the nonautomatic electric kettle. I had put the kettle on for tea and forgot all about it, reading in my room. Toivo and a friend arrived home, drunk, to smoke and smouldering lino. They shouted, and threw water on the flames. I ran out into an arena of two silhouetted men moving through the smoke, coughing. Soon the fire was out, the floor wet and charred.

  Inna was away, but got back shortly afterwards. She was very calm. “Juhtus,” she said soothingly, “it happens.” I was deeply upset. Neither Inna nor Toivo seemed to mind at all, and seemed, in fact, mildly puzzled by my emotion. I wonder now if their lack of recrimination, their instant forgiveness, came about because Inna felt guilty about the high rent she was charging me, or ashamed, perhaps, of Toivo’s bouts of drinking and her own regular absences. But they were also essentially kind people, and they didn’t want me to feel bad. In the end, though, I think also that the fire genuinely didn’t matter much to them. They seemed surprised by how upset and remorseful I was. The lino was scarred, and I bought a rug to cover it. The kettle was ruined, and I replaced it. They probably didn’t see the scarred lino again until they packed up the flat and moved on several years later. I got a reputation for being accident-prone, which amused them, and we all carried on.

  There was something liberating about their attitude towards material
goods—they did not identify themselves with anything they owned. They did not think of others in terms of what they owned. Everyone on the collective farm owned not only roughly the same amount of things, but actually more or less exactly the same things. I thought then that perhaps we care too much about our belongings, our cleanliness, our fussy and fastidious material arrangements. Maybe something really is lost—time, and ­solidarity—in our obsession with material goods, our trap of savings, loans, and debts, our caring for the endless things that we collect along the way.

  The accident and the fire broke down a barrier between us, however, and in the long run that was not helpful. My second report to my supervisor ended on a bleak note: “Since I started this report the situation in my family has become untenable, and I am about to start the process of finding a new family, which is rather daunting and difficult. The alcoholism of the father makes it impossible for me to stay, since I haven’t been able to re-build the barrier between us [since the fire], and he is becoming threatening when drunk, especially when his wife is not here. I lock my door at night, and hear him pacing up and down, talking to himself, putting the radio on full blast, muttering angrily.” I ended, with slightly pathetic bravura: “It makes me realise that issues about self-reflexivity are essentially experiential questions, which you are bound to come up against in the field, but which there doesn’t seem much point in spending much time on before you go. Hoping to hear from you soon.”

  My supervisor wrote back, cutting to the chase: “The issue of your sexuality is clearly the most difficult issue of all. Honorary man is the best hope. I was able to be honorary woman in Trinidad which worked very well. Much as I want to see your work progress,” he added, “your safety and welfare come first and therefore do not hesitate to shift your ground or even move field site if you think you are in any danger at all. It’s just not worth it.”