Everything is Wonderful Page 13
That same evening my friend Josh rang up from New York. The telephones worked only intermittently, and international calls barely worked at all. This call, oddly, was clear and uninterrupted, and Josh launched into a monologue of the amazing people he had just met, the not-for-profit entrepreneurs, the human rights activists, the local food proponents.
“I’ve just milked a cow in a nineteenth-century shed,” I said finally, “and here you are, ringing me up from New York.”
“From Manhattan, even,” he said, and laughed.
I suddenly longed to be in Manhattan, too. This poor and remote village was becoming too real to me, maybe partly because it reminded me in so many ways of Sweden. I felt I knew it all so well, that landscape, those people. I was beginning to take the bad food, the silences, and the cold for granted. It was the new normal.
EIGHT
Winter
In December I finally made the decision to move. I went for an early morning walk in the icy wind. Everything was grey and silver: ice, concrete, sky, except an orange old sign in Russian on the ground, thrown away and partially snowed over. I felt increasingly wary of Toivo, who was now working regularly, and looked at me quietly and defiantly. He got paid in food, and borrowed my car to get around, though he didn’t quite want to ask. One day he offered, insistently, to wash it, which I said wasn’t necessary, until I understood what he wanted. He returned that day carrying his wages: a few sacks of potatoes. After lunch I went for a walk, past some men working in the forest, dark faces, white-blond hair, beards and moustaches. The snow was heavy, and I saw elk prints. I ate a handful of snow, a remembered childhood taste.
I crossed the square that night to tell Katarina about my decision to leave. The night was archaically beautiful, three elements coming together in harmony: ice, silence, and huge stars in a black heaven. It was winter.
I set my students to write essays about Christmas:
On Christmas time we have a fir-tree in our house and it is decorated with many decorations. While we were eating, somebody knocked at our door. It was Santa Claus. (Actually it was our neighbour) So, he came in and sat by the Christmas tree. And he had a quite big sack with him and there were the Christmas presents of course! That we could get our presents, we had to sing, dance or do something funny. I sang a Christmas song, my father danced and my mother kissed Santa Claus, And then we got our presents.
x-mas
x-mas in Estonia is new thing. Because few years ago, when we were in Soviet Union we had no x-mas. Then was another party, which was almost the same, only it was later. But now it is like everywhere, I think. People are at home with their parents etc. Of course we have special Christmasfood. One old tradition is that in Christmas night, must be food at the table, because then . . . I don’t know what then will be. But I’m not very interested about it (all Christmas I mean), because I don’t believe it all (Jesus Christ etc) But if it’s true, then after death I’m going to hell. Sad but true.
All the subtle signs of globalisation spoke to me. One day there was a Michael Jackson sticker on the vase of Christmas decorations on the kitchen table. Ene was a fan. I told her he had been arrested, and was surprised by the fact that she already knew, and knew enough to say that she thought the sister, Latoya, who I think had testified against him in the case, was crazy. I had never thought much about Michael Jackson and his trials and tribulations, but nevertheless at that moment I felt so comforted by this sign that the village, the peninsula, and Estonia were moving towards the globalised culture I was part of. There was another little sticker next to Michael Jackson, a little oval I recognised as originating from an orange saying DOLE COSTA RICA. It was a faint reminder of another life—a life of oranges; and fridges filled with yogurt, cheeses, vegetables and fruit, prepacked chicken, and sushi; and newspapers and books and magazines on kitchen tables. DOLE COSTA RICA—this little oval flag from a single orange, probably a gift, had made its unchartered way into this particular kitchen in this particular village, saved by a thirteen-year-old girl who collected references from the West, as they all did. I looked at it and my mouth watered.
Before Christmas, Inna, the school secretary, offered me her flat, perhaps encouraged to do so by Laine, the headmistress, who probably thought of my stay with Inna and Toivo as a potential problem. I had already warned them that I might leave, but now I had to tell them that I really was going. We sat in the kitchen. They visibly stiffened, and didn’t say very much. Inna disappeared out somewhere.
There was a storm, and there was no water, electricity, or heating. Children, tucked into old Swedish ski jackets, were gliding around on water-covered ice patches outside the flat, screaming and struggling against the wind. Toivo, who had been sober for a while, looked subdued. Nothing more was said about it.
Virve, the teacher from Finland, had her mother over for a visit. That same evening she played the piano for Virve’s dance class. There was only one student there, Helen, a pale and ambitious twelfth grader. She and Virve, and Katarina and I, learnt to dance a square tango, and a slow and complex Polish folk dance in four stages. The music, that simple piano played by the old lady with snow-white hair, was so beautiful in the cold hall, candles ready in case of another power cut.
I stayed on for a little while after the flat had been offered. Toivo was restless and irritable, moving between the kitchen and the living room like a caged animal. He compulsively watched American films on Moscow TV, dubbed into Russian. One time he angrily demanded that I put a button back on his shirt. The next day I saw a porn magazine by the television. The children kept out of his way. Inna, on the other hand, was cooking up a storm. One day for the first time we got chicken for lunch, a large chicken, dry and chewy, probably an old hen. That same evening we had cabbage pirogis for dinner. Toivo ate, sighing loudly and somewhat theatrically; Inna sat staring out the window, silent and impervious; Ene came gliding in, and quickly ate a bun and drank a glass of milk, standing by the kitchen sink.
Earlier that day I had looked for an abandoned house I had found recently to photograph it, but I couldn’t find it again, and instead rambled on almost to the sea. I found an abandoned shed, and went inside. The hide of some animal was spread out on the ground, with wet tufts of hair, and there was a faint smell of meat and blood. It looked as though a sacrifice had taken place. I left quickly, and got a lift back with a man; we didn’t say much.
I went to see Katarina afterwards, and found her with some fish, three perch. She had found, to her horror, that they were still alive after she bought them, tossing noisily in the kitchen in a flimsy plastic bag. After asking me to kill them first, she did it herself, like the sea captain’s daughter she was, and cooked them, too. It was the first fish I had had on the collective farm—no one fished much anymore. We ate, and watched a strange pop programme on her TV. The lead guitarist had pink-red hair, and three girls danced on top of a car, eating bananas. Katarina frowned. She didn’t like the subsequent act in the programme either: a collection of suited men wearing Palestinian shawls.
“It’s not right to joke about serious matters,” she said disapprovingly, as she knit her red dress. It had become twisted, a long red tube, and she looked at it helplessly, but kept on knitting nevertheless.
That week we were told that there would be no more hot water until February because a pipe had burst and they were “renovating” the system. Up until then there had only been a little tepid water once a week. One evening we did suddenly have hot water, and took turns showering in the dirty but at least now quite warm little bathroom. I walked out later, into the black and starry early evening, and saw flames in the workshop, and shadows of men against the windows. I came closer, and saw the men shovelling coal into the old furnace, blackened faces and hands, orange flames and huge furnace. It was like a socialist realist painting. It seems there was coal again. The next day Inna enquired, and was told that there would be hot water every even
ing from then on. It lasted a day. The next evening, there was only about half an hour’s worth of tepid water, and then even that came to an end.
Katarina and I celebrated my new flat with dinner at the Rootsi Kohvik in Happsalu. The atmosphere was a little strained between a Russian group of guests and the few Estonians in the room. The silent and correct Estonian waiter brought the food quickly. Afterwards we went again to the cinema—cold, uncomfortable, and next to empty. Two girls giggled helplessly in front of us as the story—The Prince of Tides—unfolded.
Soon I moved into the new flat. It had a small hall with a narrow shelf on which stood an old and semifunctioning telephone and assorted knick-knacks. The kitchen and balcony were to the right, with a dirty old stove with four buckled plates, two of which worked. There was a large fridge with Swedish magnets stuck to the door, a cold store full of old glass jars, a rickety table with two chairs, a sink and some cupboards. There were rotten carrots, sour milk, some frozen pieces of fat, and four dirty eggs in the fridge.
The room was on the other side of the hall, with a bed, a sofa, the ubiquitous wall unit, a big old Russian TV, and a curiously English-looking broken electric fire with a fake log and brick effect. The bathroom was small and blue, with some silver-grey foam squares on the floor. The bath, also, was painted blue, as was, strangely, the inside of the lavatory. Again, I cleaned obsessively, though I tried to keep the eggs. They turned out to be rotten.
This block of flats—three stories instead of two—dated from the 1970s, and had a flushing lavatory. There was no hot water, of course, but I could keep clean, as I had done all along, by heating water on the stove, pouring it into a bucket, and sponging myself down. I relished being in the flat. It was as if I was acting out an immigrant’s story of coming first to a cheap hotel, then to lodgings, and finally to my own place. It wasn’t just the relief to be away from Toivo, though there was that, of course. It was also the fact that I was progressing in that small world, following a narrative of progress and assimilation that was hard to resist.
The flat was across the hall from Alar and Heli, the English teacher and his wife, who soon became friends. They took me shopping in Haapsalu. We drove through a snowstorm over the ice, skidding over the vast expanse in the near whiteout with a giddy sense of the five meters of water beneath us, and the frightening possibility of missing the intermittent flimsy snow poles on the ice that formed the path over the sea. We made it across, and went to the new little supermarket, where they bought the last box of corn flakes and an ice cream each, to eat in the snowstorm.
Now that I was living on my own I was buying my own food, and became more aware of prices. The cost of that box of corn flakes was about five hours of lessons, in other words about a day’s work for Alar. Before the currency reform in 1992, when the Estonian kroon was introduced as the only legal tender in Estonia, the economy was divided into an eastern and a western zone. The value of the rouble had been set at 10 percent of the kroon. People with savings saw the worth of what they had in the bank decimated: 1,000 roubles, a decent saving, approximately equivalent to £1,000 or so before 1989 (though you couldn’t, of course, exchange it), became 100 kroons in the bank, worth no more than £10. It was the price paid for independence. The rouble itself was going down faster than the kroon, so hard as it was, it was a good decision. In September 1993 the average monthly wage in Estonia was 800 kroon (about £40). It was, of course, an anomalous economic situation. By 2005 the average monthly wage was about 8,000 kroon, increasing, by 2008, to nearly 13,000 kroon—Estonia did well, and was about to do better. But they didn’t know that then.
In 1993 the Soviet hard-currency stores had multiplied, and still carried almost only Western goods, whilst the old shops sold mainly produce from the Eastern Bloc. There were also some new Western-style supermarkets. Even though the difference between the two kinds of shops was slowly eroding, the price differential between formerly Soviet and Western goods was still huge. Food—wine, coffee, cereal, and biscuits—imported from the West sold for Western prices. Food imported from eastern Europe sold for eastern European prices.
Western products, despite the fact that they were enormously expensive, were seen as superior (“normal”), whilst products made in countries of the former Soviet Union were often suspected of being polluted by chemicals or Chernobyl radiation. The private shop in the village, for example, started stocking Ariel washing powder, at a cost of about 35 kroons (£1.75), six times more than the local powder, which itself had increased so much in price that it represented nearly an hour’s average work. The high cost, however, did not mean that Ariel was treated like an exclusive boutique washing powder. People knew that it was “normal,” and its superiority was defined in strictly functional terms. Given that the Estonian washing powder turned clothes of any light colour grey, that was perhaps not surprising. I used it, for my own complicated existential reasons, washing clothes in my bucket hanging them to dry in my bathroom.
People who had been abroad, usually to Helsinki, kept stockpiles at home of flour, pasta, rice, and soap—all things formerly unavailable. Now you could buy them at a lower price in Estonia than in Finland. The 1989–93 period was a difficult time, culminating in the Russian constitutional crisis. People didn’t know which way things would go. It was only two years earlier that they had had rationing and food queues.
The school cook, large and alcoholic, swaying as she dished out the food, experimented with a private enterprise one day. School meals were already privatised—you paid for your meals before entering the dining room, and got a ticket saying exactly what you had paid for: so many pieces of bread, the main meal (mainly boiled potatoes, picked by the students from the school fields), pudding and tea, if available. That particular day she had made some portions of pancakes with jam, and sold them for 2 kroons (10 pence) herself. That was about the price of a full meal; this was an impromptu privatisation within the privatisation. It seemed like a new beginning, but to my knowledge it was never repeated. Even though the pancakes sold out, her enterprise went by the wayside, like the branch of the bank that never opened.
Estonia was a society in transformation. Things that had been normal a year or two ago were now more and more seen as “not normal.” Amitav Ghosh, in his wonderful book about a remote Egyptian village, In an Antique Land, describes the fellaheens’ relationship to the concept of “development”:
I had an inkling then of the real and desperate seriousness of their engagement with modernism, because I realized that the fellaheen saw the material circumstances of their lives in exactly the same way that a university economist would: as a situation that was shamefully anachronistic, a warp upon time; I understood that their relationships with the objects of their everyday lives was never innocent of the knowledge that there were other places, other countries which did not have mud-walled houses and cattle-drawn ploughs, so that those objects, those houses and ploughs, were insubstantial things, ghosts displaced in time, waiting to be exorcized and laid to rest.
My friends and informants would have understood that feeling. They knew that not only was the collective farm itself rendered obsolete by the changes in the country, but so was the greater part of their material culture: the dusty and dilapidated culture house, the agricultural machinery slowly rusting in a backyard, the crumbling concrete staircases, the broken Ladas, the Russian kettles and polyester clothes. They used to be the Westerners of the Soviet Bloc; now they were the Easterners of Europe.
People had been waiting for the new wood-chip heating unit to come from Sweden, the best part of the aid package from the twin town. The thing finally arrived, and was installed, I think, with some difficulty. The piping was too rusty for it to work properly, but it was a start. Two unemployed Swedes were sent over—this was, in fact, a Swedish-style job creation scheme—to do the snagging after the installation, because the Swedes didn’t trust the Estonians with proper and thorough cleaning and
painting. They were not a success, however, doing a cursory job, and spending their evenings in the bar complaining of boredom and isolation. There was still no hot water, and not much heating either.
January turned cold. The fields through my window were snow-covered, a comforting monochrome at early afternoon dusk, like the grey screen of my Mac laptop in front of me. Temperatures dipped to minus 33 degrees centigrade at night, and there was not much heating in the flats. Heli and Alar lent me a spare electric radiator. They had been sued for not paying their heating bills, which came to 500 kroons, about £25, per month. His salary then was about 800 kroons and she had only 150 in child support. There was little communal heating, despite the bills, and people had to rely on private radiators, and it was patently absurd that anyone in those circumstances would pay the bill. There were scenes in the teachers’ room between Alar and Ivar, now an elected member of the council. Alar was the only person to protest.
When Leigh left she gave me her American therapy tape on depression to keep, which I listened to whilst I did the cleaning or washing up. It was a voice from another culture. Some rare days were blue and sunny. Children bundled up in donated Swedish ski clothes tottered about. Most days were not. The cold was intense, the kind of cold that makes breathing hard. The kind of cold that is actually frightening. One day, without thinking about it, I stepped out on my balcony with wet hair. It froze instantly. I thought if I were, by any chance, to be locked out on the balcony in this cold, without a coat, I would die.
About this time I visited Felix Sedman, an elderly Estonian Swede, to invite him to a showing of a Swedish TV documentary about the peninsula. Sedman had been interviewed in it, but no one had thought to invite him. He seemed not to remember the documentary at first, but eventually he did, and accepted my invitation in a hesitant deep voice. He was an artist, and his back garden was full of his sculptures. He told me to go to the back and take a look at his parents, and there they were, moulded in concrete and painted yellow, on a pedestal of grey Soviet bricks, inscribed MIN MOR O FAR. “My Mother and Father.” A memorial. It struck me again, seeing that, how sad this area must have been after the war, with half the people gone, family and friends dead or abroad, and traumatised strangers from Russia taking over the farms.