Everything is Wonderful Read online

  “Sometimes I think the Estonians are worse than the Greeks,” she said.

  I smiled uncertainly.

  “Oh yes,” she said firmly, “they are worse than Jews, worse than Armenians. You can’t trust them anymore. You must always control your money!”

  After the war she had sold her diamond earrings for a pair of winter boots, and now she was afraid of selling her house for too little money. Controlling your money, counting your change, giving up on the idea that the Estonians were intrinsically more honest than the Russians, the Greeks, the Jews, and the Armenians was a concession for her, after a lifetime of patriotism and prejudice.

  After that particular visit I came back to Pürksi quite tired. The wind was howling outside, and the village dogs seemed restless, barking more than usual. I slept in the afternoon, and then something seemed to be happening—there were people coming and going, talking in loud, worried voices. Inna went out, then came back, and telephoned. As usual they didn’t tell me what was happening. When I went to see what was going on, Toivo, bare-chested, greeted me, and Inna, smiling, asked me if I was ill.

  About this time Leigh decided that she couldn’t face another lonely winter in Pürksi. She suddenly decided to leave, at once, before the deep winter set in. Alar, the English teacher, invited Katarina, Virve, and me to a small party to say goodbye to her. We drank tea and coffee, ate cakes, and drank strawberry naps (schnapps) and Estonian blue gin. We talked about the school and the village. Virve, enlivened by the naps, claimed that Laine surrounded herself with favourites, like Kulla, who got various privileges and who were not trained teachers. “We call her the postmistress,” she said acidly, “because she used to work for the post.”

  Alar and his wife, Heli, more energetic than most of the people on the collective farm, talked about a measuring device for electricity, which one could buy and install, with some difficulty (both technical and bureaucratic), that would take the cheaper night rates into account. Alar was measuring the temperature of his hot water every day—never warmer than 30 degrees—in order to back up his protest at paying for hot water and not getting it. This was the first time I met them. They were to become my neighbours and friends, though I didn’t know that then.

  At home, Toivo was drunk and sad because a friend of his had died. He had died because some work at the kolkhoz had been given to a younger man. Timo later said he’d heard that he had drank himself to death. Someone else said he had died of a heart attack, or perhaps blood poisoning. Without a functioning state, causes of death were uncertain. He didn’t reach the life expectancy of the times, that dismal 60.5 years for men. Perhaps he actually did die of the combination of the causes people talked about, all of which were implicated in that low life expectancy; perhaps he died from alcohol, and a heart attack, and blood poisoning, and losing his job, and giving up. Toivo invited me to the funeral, and then drank more and more, pacing the narrow corridor. Inna was gone. For the first time I fled him, and the flat, and went over to Katarina’s to sleep on her sofa. She was knitting on her eternal red dress, and gave me Swedish chocolate and talked sagely about alcoholics she had known, before bedding me down with a blanket.

  The next day I waited for Toivo at noon, like we had agreed, to go to the funeral. At 11:30 he had knocked at my door, and stood in the doorway swaying, trying hard to concentrate, still drunk from the night before, asking me to be ready soon. I went to the school to eat, and sat with Selma, the elderly school accountant, in worried silence. Then I went to Kulla, and told her what had happened. She looked at me with some concern, and said that she would come and speak to him. I felt an anthropological duty to attend a funeral (notes on cosmology, notes on death), and this seemed my best opportunity. I asked, therefore, Kulla to come. She refused, of course. I waited for a while, and then went back to the flat to find Inna on the phone. Toivo had already gone. My chapter on death didn’t happen.

  Later Inna, for the first time, made spaghetti in a lumpy, salty white sauce. Toivo was out, and all was quiet. Somebody—­presumably Toivo—came back very late, then there was a crash, and then silence. The next day Inna cooked an unexpectedly good dinner: tiny pieces of mutton with cabbage, carrots, and potatoes. Toivo was flushed and bloated and quiet. Inna left soon after dinner. I went to my room with a cup of tea, and Toivo came in with an unprecedented plate of stuffed cookies, filled with condensed milk, and apples, saying, “It’s no good this drinking tea with nothing to eat.” He was making amends. His kindness had the effect of suddenly making the whole situation real. It struck me then with some force that I was not always going to live like this, and, also, that important parts of this experience were already over and done with.

  Now I think about the children. Ene, the girl, was translucent, and quiet. Erki was in my English class, a tough kid, but sweet, too. He tittered knowingly with the other kids, and seemed quite happy. I wonder about the effect on Ene and Erki of Toivo’s drinking. Inna was usually smiling and quiet. Toivo, even when he was sober, vacillated between suspicion, heartiness, and a depressed silence. They had no family life to speak of. The children came and went, and so did the parents. What did they make of me, I also wonder now, with all my books, my polite and broken Estonian, my obvious or unexpected questions, and nebulous topic of research? I have no idea, but I suppose I must have been discussed, though it never seemed so at the time. So little was discussed in my presence, but perhaps in my absence a completely different life was going on. They might, at least, have been speculating or gossiping about me—at the time it never occurred to me that they did, but now I think they certainly must have.

  There were two modes to my experience of being in Estonia, one almost surreal and extraordinary, and the other very real—­reassuringly real—which had something to do with being in that landscape, so grey, so ordinary, so reassuring. November was cold, though: minus 16 degrees during the day and minus 20 at night for days. A kind of weather chauvinism set in, with people saying that minus 15 is nothing out of the ordinary—wait until the temperature drops to minus 25 or so . . . One cold afternoon in November I went for a walk to see the red sun setting in the white sky over the icy fields, the snow like fine arctic dust.

  Of course the November cold snap didn’t last. The temperature came back to around zero, and our plans to drive over the ice to Haapsalu, which had come to nothing anyway because of Toivo’s drinking spree, were shelved, as was my aesthetic exhilaration. The reality of the collective farm hit me again—the constant cabbage and potatoes, the dirt, the drinking, and, again, the fact of living in an environment where I could express and understand only slightly more than the barest minimum.

  My imagination, though, didn’t seem to properly encompass the notion that what I didn’t understand might be significant, and that I was therefore perhaps not just missing individual words but also essential meaning. The limited communication I had with people was so perfectly matched by the aesthetic of the village; the limits of meaning reflected in the limits of the architecture, the crumbling concrete and broken glass, the permanent deep pool of frothy water on the other side of our living block caused by a broken pipe. It was an aesthetic of disconnections and disjointed meaning, of loss of memory and narrative, reflected in my mind by the disconnections in my Estonian.

  The small improvements in my language seemed, deceptively, to be reflected in the small improvements, or changes, in the village, bridging the gap of strangeness. Thus the day in September when they finally took down the kolkhoz sign and replaced it with a sign for the small bank office that was going to open in the culture hall was followed shortly afterwards by the first day I felt that I was really taking part in a conversation, and understanding what people were saying. My progress in the language seemed to reflect the progress of the place. The bank office never did open. The sign, however, remained for a while; another lost future. There was a kind of madness in those connections, I now think, a slightly hallucinatory
quality, and no wonder: how strange it all was.

  Haapsalu in November was empty of cars, and seemingly almost of people. Women pulled children on sledges, and there were frost patterns like stars on the windows of the low wooden houses. One night I visited the new restaurant, Rootsi Kohvik (Swedish Café), with Katarina. A fragile crescent moon hung above the surreal miniature high-rise outside, almost square in shape, built as a training ground for firefighters. Afterwards we went to the cinema and saw Accidental Hero, starring Dustin Hoffman. The auditorium was cold, with wooden seats, and the sound of the projector was very loud. The film, with Russian and Estonian subtitles, was not dubbed. There were about twelve people there, more than I had ever seen before.

  A few days later we had lunch in the main restaurant in Haapsalu, a Soviet-style self-service canteen. It was a huge room, with few tables, at which two separate groups of men were seated. In the ice-cold lobby a Russian woman guarded the lavatories, selling rough pieces of lavatory paper. Two younger Russian women, heavily made up, were waiting, possibly for customers. An old man sat on a bench opposite, smoking. The food—a few plates of dried-out potato salad, a choice between kotlet and schnitzel, with potatoes and cabbage—was dismal. I asked for the schnitzel, and the pale, silent woman fished out a small piece of charred, dried fat. I had the cutlet instead, a black and hard piece of meat, and found pieces of what I hoped was bone and dreaded was teeth in it. The cabbage was too sour to eat. The men stared at us in silence.

  We went to the café next door, and had some coffee poured from a 1960s-looking urn with a handle, and a dry piece of cake. Unlike the restaurant, there were some Western signs there—­adverts for Wrigley’s chewing gum, Finnish chocolates, Fanta, and Coca-Cola, though no actual chewing gum or chocolates or soft drinks. It was very easy to imagine what it must have been like a year or two earlier, though, with the same empty shelves, the same weak coffee in glasses with sugar already measured up.

  Afterwards we wandered through the run-down Russian Orthodox cemetery. There were Estonian, Russian, German, and Swedish names on the headstones. At the end was a chapel. A woman in a headscarf was on her knees cleaning the floor with a dirty rag. She called the priest out to meet us. He was Estonian, young and thin and bearded. He greeted us eagerly, and showed us the icons and the books, and sang for us in Old Church Slavonic, the Orthodox liturgical language. He told us about the controversy now in the Estonian Orthodox community about whether they should stay under Moscow, or go over to Constantinople. Before we left, he blessed us.

  I came back to the flat to find Toivo on his own, hanging around the cupboard in the kitchen where I suspected he kept a supply of vodka. Glassy-eyed and unsteady, he told me I should have driven over the ice.

  “But there is water on top of the ice,” I said. “It was there yesterday. It’s breaking up.”

  “Sa kardad [You are afraid],” he said, swaying, and laughed at me.

  I took refuge in my room, feeling that I was beginning to understand the urge for high culture in the Soviet empire—I craved poetry and classical music, some pathos to make sense of the poverty and dirt and idiotic drunkenness. The people on the collective farm had little connection either with the land or with high culture. They just got by, day by day, enduring the uncertainty, the confusion, and the quiet fear: fear of unemployment, fear of Russia, fear of the future. Many people were leaving, too. You would see an old lorry parked outside a window and a group of men slowly transferring the belongings of a family through the window onto the lorry. They stood there, smoking and chatting quietly, languidly moving the few things they had to move. Then they’d be gone, and that was that.

  November merged into December. I visited as many people as I could out on the farms. Many of the people there were born on the peninsula, and some had grown up in the farmhouses where they still lived. I had a new farm acquaintance called Terje. She was from town originally, bored and languid, unused to the country and the hard work. She had two young girls and a foster daughter. I liked being on that farm and, particularly, visiting her animals, her pigs and cows, and her calves, licking my hand with their coarse, wet tongues.

  I often came back to Leida and Lydia, too, mostly because I liked them. I felt at home with their Swedishness; they felt familiar to me. They were, also, welcoming and generous, giving me lunch or cake every time I visited. Lunch might be potatoes boiled in their skins, with some fried herring, homogenised at the bottom of an old tin bowl. It was easy, when we talked, to forget this quiet poverty: the milk in a tin jug, the tin bowl for the scraps of herring, and the bucket of water from the well. They never complained.

  After one visit I said I was thinking of driving to the sea, and invited them to come. Lydia suggested that Leida come with me. We then decided instead to go to Pürksi, where Lydia had a sister. They both got changed, and Lydia, laboriously getting around on her little stool, went to the cupboard to find a gift for me, a stale Swedish mini Mars bar sent by some relative long ago, which she threw over to me in return for the lift. We got her into the car with not too much trouble. I had assumed, once there, that we would be invited into her sister’s house. I think Lydia and Leida thought so, too, because they brought the stool. But there was a tractor in the way, and the sister’s husband showed no inclination to move it. Nor did he come up to the car to greet us. After some time, the sister came out and sat with us in the car for a while, a pale grandchild with a dirty face on her lap. She said we had to sit there, since Lydia couldn’t get out.

  Eventually we left. There was, by then, a dreadful stench in the car. We drove by the sea, which was frozen and beautiful, and Leida and I got out for a bit. At the house Lydia refused further help, and said she wanted to be out in the fresh air for a while. She sat on the ice-cold stone steps and waited for me to be gone.

  I also met a Swedish farmer called Astrid, the retired secretary of the village council. She invited me for milking and dinner, having heard me say that I had never milked a cow. She met me on the step with outstretched arms, and then we went in. I waited for a long time in the living room, basking in the warmth of the old stove behind me, attempting a little conversation with her son’s girlfriend from Tallinn, but without much success. The son was silent, tinkering with something at a desk, and Astrid was, I think, feeding her husband in the kitchen. He was Estonian, a returned deportee, silent and distant, marked by his experiences.

  Astrid made me dress in special milking clothes: an old cardigan and a pair of trousers, a hat and scarf, an old coat and special boots. We got the sterilised milk cans, and went out to the barn, where two black and glossy cows stood happily chewing the cud, alongside six hens and a white rooster from Krasnodar, perched on a beam. Astrid washed the teats with water, and spread a little Vaseline on them to stop them from cracking. She showed me how to sit on the low stool, close to the warm cow, and press and pull the teats at the same time, the lovely intimate practise of milking. As we were milking peacefully side by side, we had an interesting conversation about cows, and about the kolkhoz, which continued inside.

  Then we had dinner: pork with onion gravy, homemade sauerkraut and boiled potatoes, followed by whipped cream and homemade cranberry compote. It’s hard to describe how delicious that dinner was in the context of the food I ate every day. During the war, if you were living with rationing, you might have fantasised about a dinner like that. I saved Astrid’s recipe for the sauerkraut, but never tried it. I suspect it wouldn’t have worked as well outside the specific bacterial environment of the farm—that particular probiotic brew creating the sourness of sauerkraut. They were virtually self-sufficient on that farm. They had milk, eggs, chicken, pork, beef, potatoes, peas, onions, apples, carrots, cabbage, cucumbers, and cranberries, and mushrooms in the forest and fish from the sea. But perhaps that incredible meal was unusual for them, too—in fact, in retrospect I think it must have been a feast, presented in the typical low-key Estonian way.

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bsp; Astrid’s family had lived on this farm for generations. The old farmhouse burnt down in 1974, and they rebuilt it more or less as it was. It had the same rooms and facilities the old farmhouse had: wood-burning stoves for heating and cooking, cold larders for meat and milk. No refrigeration. No running water and no sanitation. But even without those things, the home and the dinner felt so luxurious. There was something here, still, of the culture of the independence era, despite the fire, the deportation, and the collectivisation. That culture of farming self-sufficiency hadn’t survived in the village, but it survived here, I think because Astrid was so competent and so strong.

  As I ate, Astrid talked. She was angry both with the collectivisation and with the demise of the kolkhoz. She talked about the war, and how the Germans evacuated Estonians from the Russian border, and moved them to Noarootsi, where there were many abandoned farms after the Swedes left. The refugees, she said, had already suffered years of disorder in the Soviet Union. They didn’t know how to take care of things, and didn’t care. They burnt furniture and beams to keep warm.

  “The abandoned cattle,” she continued, “were screaming in their pastures.”

  I looked up from my plate. She had actually said that. It seemed that she said it not because she could no longer remember the Swedish word for the sound cows make when they are distressed, but because she thought “screaming” was the better word. She felt their suffering.

  After dinner I drove on towards Österby, and then out to the sea. There were some strong lights on in Haapsalu, and the sea was only partly icy. Pürksi, later, seemed more alien than usual, with its dilapidated blocks of flats, and its rubbish bags torn to pieces and spread around by the dogs. The snow had turned to slush, revealing the dirt. In the flat, Toivo was unexpectedly grinding meat, alone, in the kitchen. There was, also, an unprecedented jug of mint tea on the table, somewhat making up for the bleak reality of Pürksi.