Everything is Wonderful Page 11
I didn’t think I was in danger, but honorary man? The best I might hope for was honorary (accident-prone) child, and even that was quite hard to maintain. I suspect that the transition from man to honorary woman is generally easier than that from woman to honorary man. But perhaps, also, when you do fieldwork in a culture so similar to your own it’s less easy to conceal your identity. Much as I knew them, I think now, they also knew me.
I had to replace my car whilst it was being repaired, and eventually found a “contact” via Riima, my journalist friend in Tallinn, to help. He took me to the second-hand car market in Mustamäe, a huge repository of second-hand Western cars replacing the eastwards-drifting Ladas.
“I can say that the Russian market is such a big hole for the Ladas,” he said in English as we wandered around the huge market, my feet like blocks of ice. A Lada in St. Petersburg cost $500 more than in Tallinn—they liked Ladas because they could get parts. “They think it’s normal,” he said, “to have such a battle with the car.”
“It must have been strange,” I said, tired, “when all the Western cars started to come into Estonia.”
“Why?” he said sternly, looking at me intently. The young and business-minded didn’t want to be reminded of the past.
I found, eventually, a little Renault that seemed all right, though in fact it was a failure from the beginning. I had several hitchhikers with me as I drove back to the peninsula the following day, some of whom were my students, and a Russian woman I didn’t know. They sat in thoughtful silence as the car inexplicably ground to a halt, time and time again. I have no memory of what I did with that clapped-out old car, but I know I eventually got my Volvo back, with a brand-new engine from the Volvo centre. But in the depths of winter it wouldn’t start—in the deepest cold, when the collective farm Ladas started easily, my Volvo was dead. The men would gather around it, hood open, to help me start it. There they stood, without gloves or hats, leisurely discussing the internal workings of the Volvo, whilst I stood with them, nearly weeping with the numbing cold of minus 30 degrees. And the guilt of being helped by people who expected nothing in return.
On that trip back from Tallinn we made it—just—in time for me to join the new aerobic class in school. The class, attended by teenage girls, was surprisingly lenient. The most taxing exercise was a fast walk in a circle to very loud music. The rest of it consisted of leisurely stretches—circling the wrists and ankles and so on—to encouraging and entirely superfluous shouts from our tracksuited and trim instructor, whom I had never seen before. I only went once, and I don’t think it continued, in any case. Winter eventually ended most extracurricular activities. Life became increasingly routine, circumscribed by the cold and the dark, and a kind of winter fatigue that affected everyone. I recorded a grim succession of days in my diary, including a record of the food we ate, because I was always mildly hungry. Thus I know that on 15 November 1993 I had stale bread with cheese for breakfast, and that I then went for a walk, though I felt too tired to go all the way to Österby, the nearest village. I washed a sheet in the bucket, and picked up my post. School lunch was cabbage soup and dry bread. I corrected the horrifyingly bad English tests. Dinner was buckwheat with little bits of meat. The snow, I wrote, was drifting like dry white dust across the roads, and it got dark by three in the afternoon. At night the temperature dropped to minus 15 degrees. The following day I walked in the hazy afternoon, the sun setting across the fields, trees frosted and wintry. Everything was blissfully quiet. I was tired, and often hungry, but even now, twenty years later, I miss those long quiet walks in that melancholy and restful landscape.
At about this time Toivo, Inna, and Kulla invited Katarina and me to come to the beach resort of Pärnu, to stay with some friends of theirs. Pärnu was once a pretty spa resort, but in the early 1990s, and off-season, it was run-down and depressing. The friends invited us out to dinner and a “variety show” on a small ship permanently anchored in an inlet, a cold and dreary place with a casino, a topless bar, and pole dancing. We sat at a table, watching a topless young woman mechanically curl her body around a metal pole.
“This show is good,” said Kulla, “but in Tallinn you get better quality.”
Our host, smoking his Marlboros, gold signet ring glinting on his finger, replied that in Stockholm and Helsinki you got better shows still. The dancer looked cold and tired. She was related to someone, of course—everyone always was in this tiny country. We talked about her sister and her family. Katarina and I politely sipped our beer, and so did they. The evening wore on, more dancers arrived, and our hosts continued to discuss them in terms of their families and their dancing technique. One of the performers during the course of the evening, indeed, was pointed out as a well-known ballerina.
I still don’t fully understand that evening. Did they secretly find it erotic? I can imagine few scenes less erotic than that cold bar, that polite conversation, those bland Marlboro Lights, and that relentless respectability. The “cultured’ conversation about the sad dance, the cold and empty casino, the references to clubs in Tallinn, to Helsinki and Stockholm, may, I think, genuinely have been their idea of how people talked in the West, since those kinds of places were, of course, a Western import. But what did they imagine we would make of a place like that? Was that stiff and dull conversation a facade, a dull play for my and Katarina’s benefit? Was it the case that because they knew that I was writing about them, they were on their best behaviour? And that I missed this because at home Toivo and Inna rarely tried to cover up family dysfunction? They seemed to me, in fact, always authentically themselves. That was their best trait.
Even so, without us, the pole dancing might have been slightly more raucous, or at least fun and transgressive. Perhaps with us there, a stiff and respectable conversation emerged in deference to respectability. But I don’t think so. I think they genuinely didn’t yet know the habits of the West and were trying to approximate something of our culture, without prejudice. The feminist debate about power and objectification, which no one in England, or Europe, or America, could possibly have missed, had not taken place in the Soviet Union. The notion that the dancers were being exploited seemed not to enter their minds. What they had grown up transgressing against was the repressive and stagnated system of actually existing socialism—and that was hardly a protest anymore. Perhaps the pole dancing, for them, was a gesture of protest against a system that no longer existed, and at the same time an uncritical appropriation of Western culture.
And what was it like for the young dancers? What happened to the dancer whose family was so well known to all at the table, or to the ballerina? What were their dreams, and where did they end up? Maybe it was a fleeting phase, and they look back now at what they did then with some private surprise, perhaps, at their audacity, or at how little they were paid, or at how much people drank and gambled. And they must think, I suppose, from time to time, about all the men, whatever went on after hours.
Many Estonian women at that time turned to prostitution. The Baltic Observer interviewed a prostitute who was a former medical student:
“If you ever fall in love and marry a poor man, won’t you have problems sharing your life with him without payment?” the journalist asked.
“I wouldn’t marry a poor man, regardless of how pleasant he is. I don’t believe in love, since my society believes only in buying and selling. Money is the main thing in life.”
Defiant collective capitalism; such was the zeitgeist. Post-Soviet seedy clubs were springing up everywhere. Pornography, suddenly, was spreading quickly—even in the cosy little post office in the village a single pornographic magazine made a brief appearance. The TV show that depicted Tallinn high life—Mafia life, perhaps—was full of prostitutes and strange clubs, crime, fast cars, and mobile phones. It became its own cliché; one expected nothing less (and nothing more) of the New Estonians.
In the spring a topless carwash
opened in Tallinn. That was really strange, particularly given the Estonian climate. I theorised to Danny Miller, my supervisor:
The mockery of the transformation [worker to topless worker] effects a simultaneous humiliation of the abstract “worker” and the woman who works: it represents the world turned upside down in a carnivalesque joke intended to degrade the former system. This humiliation is a twin ideological sacrilege undermining both the “worker” and the “woman,” the latter joining the “worker” as the second pillar of the Soviet state during Stalin’s elevation of “mother-hood” to a quasi-sacred national duty. It is, then, a revenge on the Soviet system, but it is also, for both the women and the men, the workers and the employers, the promotion of identities which become deliberate symbols for what the system has turned into. In other words, one of the symbolic meanings of the act is the engagement of the self in a process of humiliation which expresses the commonly perceived moral degradation both of the Soviet state, and of the post-Soviet state. If the former was seen as primarily hypocritical in terms of how it dealt with sexuality and gender relations, the latter is seen as abandoning all moral intent, creating societies where money is the bottom line.
Danny didn’t think much of that, quite rightly: “I am not sure about your topless interpretation which might have gone ‘over the top’ if you forgive the pun, but it is interesting.” He didn’t say so, but I think the point is that this kind of analysis is not fieldwork based, and therefore ignores both “culture,” and individuals and their decisions.
There must have been a conversation, a moment when someone said, “Hey, that’s a great idea!” Or, “Yeah, saw that in Riga!” Or, “Let’s try it—it won’t cost much.” And there, paid a bit more than they might be as waitresses, or tipped a bit more, topless young women washed cars in the cold spring. I imagine the chemical cleansing agent in steaming water turning their fingers red and sore. I imagine dancing little steps and postures over the windscreens, Mafia types with short blond hair, on their mobiles, staring.
We think we know what they are like, those girls and those Mafia types, but we don’t. All we know are clichés. Fieldwork can get you beyond the clichés, but only if you stay with the people for so long that you almost want to just stay forever. Then you have to leave, before you tip over the edge and go native. Imagining those cold hands, those postures, those customers, is not good enough, and even seeing them and talking to them is not good enough: that’s just journalism. In anthropology, only participant observation—living and working side by side with people for a year or more, noting, observing, and thinking about their culture—gives you the authority to write about them. Or so we believed.
Ivar, the history teacher on the collective farm, would have despised the nihilism of the pole dancing and pornography: no cultural relativist, he. He was young and energetic, with a wispy, frankly unsuccessful beard. He was idealistic and perennially ironic, an expert on the history of the Swedes, and one of the main forces behind the adult school and the attempt to reestablish Swedishness in the area. His interest in this was abstract and historical—he himself was not a local and was without Swedish connections, though he did speak Swedish well.
Ivar had decided to stand to become a member of the local council. I went with him to put up notices of his political programme in the old barns where people collected their post. We cycled around the peninsula for hours, hanging flyers next to the tin post boxes with handwritten names on them. I remember the sense of purpose I felt whilst cycling on those long dirt roads, pine trees swaying. I have no idea now what his programme was, and I have a feeling that perhaps I never did know, but that didn’t seem to matter much. I believed in his integrity and in his historical quest. We stopped at two Swedish farms to persuade people to come to his lecture about the Estonian Swedish history, which was scheduled for the next day. Two women did promise to come, I suspect to get us to go away, and then didn’t. In fact only Katarina, two students, and I turned up. Ivar was very angry, and gave the whole lecture in a fast Swedish monotone, which the others could barely have understood, instead of in Estonian, as planned.
Ruth, my religious informant, took me to visit another Swedish farm. Leida and Lydia were two elderly cousins living in a flaking yellow farmhouse. Leida, in a poor apron and with longish grey-brown hair, greeted us at the door. Lydia had contracted polio as a child, and was paralysed as a result. Heavy and blond, she sat on a little square stool, which she used to heave herself about in the living room, where she also slept.
Ruth told her stock stories of survival and Christian miracles with a queasy kind of authority, and they both listened respectfully. Leida, after asking me if I was in a hurry in her peculiar, monotonous Swedish accent, said she would make coffee, and disappeared to the kitchen. She didn’t say, but she was actually making lunch on the wood-fired stove: semolina porridge with apple sauce, cabbage, eggs, tiny fried sprats melting into a grey substance, biscuits, bread, and weak coffee. She brought it all to the table, and invited us to eat. Lydia remained on her low stool. There was a thick skin on the white porridge, and I stirred it, wondering if I could make myself eat it. Ruth sat next to me, happy in the warm kitchen with all the rich food. She dumped a hard-fried egg into my porridge and smiled benignly; I steeled myself and ate.
Leida had been to Sweden before, visiting relatives, and described how in Sweden there were no wood-fired stoves, only electrical ones. She talked about how rich Sweden was, how warm, how clean, how good the food was and how abundant. The others nodded. “Imagine that,” they said calmly, and “Oh really,” even though they must have heard it many times before, and imagined it, too. Their own kitchen was stocked with Swedish baking powder, vanilla sugar, cinnamon, and some coffee—otherwise there wasn’t a lot, apart from several jars of poor-quality “Indian instant coffee” of uncertain origin.
Leida and Lydia had a different relationship to Sweden than the kolkhozniks in the blocks of flats; they were Swedish themselves, and they were old. They didn’t discreetly interview me to find out what tea, what cereal, what brand of coffee, what kind of brandy or gin was “normal” and good, and which was not. They were not engaged in the process of becoming “normal” Estonians, unlike so many of the people in the village. After lunch they showed me a photo of a group of Swedish relatives standing outside a modern farmhouse, smiling at the camera, healthy and well. They had been picking potatoes. I wondered then if Leida and Lydia realised that potato picking by hand is only really a hobby in Sweden. The photograph might be interpreted differently in a culture where people still picked potatoes by hand as a matter of course in the small plots outside their houses.
Later that day Toivo and I drove to Österby, to the farm where he was doing some work. A thin old Alsatian was sitting in the garden, surrounded by many cats. We went through the farm entrance to the traditional cold room. There, on the floor, was a blood-specked pig’s head in a tin bowl, blue eyes half closed. I jumped, then looked again—the pale lashes were so human. Toivo’s salary this time was fresh meat, probably from that same pig. The farm woman asked Toivo a number of questions about me, in my presence, ranging from where I slept to how much I paid them in rent. Toivo said 300 kroon (£15) instead of the 400 kroon I actually paid, seemingly unaware that I was listening, and could understand what they said.
They left the room, and I sat waiting with a daughter and grandchild. The daughter was doing a crossword and the child was doodling. Everything was very quiet. The child put the pen in his mouth and spat it out, again and again, watching me. I clapped, quietly, to amuse him. His mother wouldn’t speak. When Toivo finally came out, he ordered me to “Come on, please” in English. The farm woman laughed. She came out with some sprat in her hand, giving one to the old dog, and one each to the three cats. Toivo asked if I wanted to drive to the sea, and we did. The sun was a blood-red ball over the horizon, and everything else was icy white. The ice was thick enough to walk on by then, and soon
it would be thick enough to drive on.
Not long after this, I got sick. The room, my room, felt drained of colour, and I felt sick of the place as well as in body, angry and frustrated. I wanted, suddenly, normal life and intelligent conversation. I felt the idiocy of talking in a language I knew only the barest bones of, the idiocy of never understanding properly, or saying what I deeply meant or thought. This was either the low point of my fieldwork, or a brief return to sanity from the practise of anthropological fieldwork. Or perhaps it was both.
When in despair, I always visited Veevi, and as soon as I recovered I did so again. She was very pleased that day because she had rung up a daily radio talk show about the new Estonia and its problems, and she had been on air.
“We scold each other,” she said to me. “We eat each other up”—she pinched her throat and showed her teeth—“because we were occupied. If England had been occupied, it would have been the same.”
“So, what did you say?” I asked.
She told me, at some length: that radio should broadcast moral debates and lectures on professional ethics; that the radio hosts must try to explain to the younger generation that the first ten years of building the first republic had also been hard; and that money must be found for concerts, exhibitions, and theatre. “Without culture,” she said sternly, “there is nothing.”
I can see her now, drilling me in exercises, standing in front of me, small and stout, waving her arms energetically, shouting, “Üks, kaks, kolm . . . one, two, three.” She diagnosed my headache as all nerves (she was right about that), or possibly caused by an insufficient blood supply to the brain. She tried to teach me to breathe properly, and applied a Chinese salve to my toes to “purify” my blood. She complained, constantly, about the state of the nation.