Everything is Wonderful Read online

  The night of the documentary I was tired. My car had got stuck in deep snow miles from anywhere as the early afternoon dusk was falling. The back wheels spun uselessly, and I was at least an hour’s walk from the nearest house, which in that severe cold was not a trivial matter. I had to get out of the car again and again to stuff branches under the tyres to give them traction. Eventually it worked.

  Later I picked up Felix Sedman with his wife. The show began downstairs in the students’ common room, a cold basement with some chairs and a table, on which stood a lamp, the shade of which was a bleak homemade creation of barbed wire and a raised scene with an old sofa and a few armchairs.

  The Swedish documentary was saved from outright sentimentality only by the outspoken nature of the Estonian participants. Felix Sedman said on camera that nothing would ever be as it was before the war because the younger generation was so lazy. Mayor Ülo Kalm, asked whether that was true, retorted that Sedman knew nothing about anything, since he was a pensioner and only moved between his house and the shop. They were both in the audience. Sedman and his wife sat in stony silence, refusing all offers of food or more comfortable chairs.

  “That was nice, wasn’t it?” said Katarina afterwards, oblivious to the atmosphere. She had saved the best sandwiches to take home, which she thought was only fair since she had made them. I refused to take anything, and went home, depressed, to read Freud’s “Dora” case study.

  Slowly I began to feel at home in my flat. Virve lived in the block opposite. I would see her open her curtains in the kitchen, notice me, and move back inside. Her Mazda was like a chubby little red bus in the snow behind a rusty, lean Lada. Katarina, also in the same block, was forever airing her rugs on the balcony, forever cleaning. She feared that Dumble, her mouse, had died, and had stopped leaving food for it, to the relief of Virve, who had disapproved of the mouse feeding from the beginning. That block also housed the dormitories for the high school borders, who trundled through the snow to the school.

  One evening I lost my key, so I went to Alar and Heli’s for help. They called Inna, the owner of the flat, gave me a drink, and then drove with me to her parents to pick up a spare key. We came back to their flat, and had several more drinks: apricot naps, first with orange juice and then with lemonade, enormously sweet, as they liked it. I had one of Alar’s cigarettes to combat the enveloping sense of sweetness. They also offered me tea, showing me the range of different tea bags they had. I chose the Lipton Earl Grey, which led to a discussion—again—of the different teas available. Was Earl Grey, they asked, better than English Breakfast? What made some Earl Grey teas better than others, and was Lipton a good make? They had tried fifteen different kinds of tea from the kaubahall (supermarket)—you could buy them by the tea bag—but they hadn’t yet discovered which was the best brand. They were trying to construct a hierarchy of taste out of the new confusion of Western products, and I was their arbiter of good taste, their informant about the West.

  The naps was going to my head, and they brought out their photo albums. I looked with fascination—they looked completely different in each picture, with different styles of clothing, hairstyles, and settings, which gave them an exciting, almost gangsterish quality. In one photo they were visiting Finland, dressed in Estonian traditional dress. Next they were in tight jeans and sleeveless T-shirts, hair punkish and semi-shaved. Then Alar, alone, was in Canada, in front of a large selection of brandy in a liquor store; making faces at two male mannequins; standing by a lake with a group of relatives, Canadian Estonians. After that, both of them were on holiday in Sweden, a big dark man putting an arm around each of them with a serene and inebriated smile. Everything was changing. It was only the dire poverty on the collective farm that kept things reasonably static.

  In mid-February it was still minus 20 degrees outside, and so cold inside the school the children sat huddled in their Swedish ski jackets and woolly hats. The teachers were tired and subdued, except, of course, for Ivar, who was always energetic. I talked to Timo. In the middle of our conversation he suddenly stopped and then said, “I’m calculating how many weeks I have left here.” I knew what he meant—we were due to leave at about the same time. I walked through the grey wintry dusk, as I did most days, snow blowing across the road, a yellow star-frosted window in a farmhouse in the woods. Just when it felt as though winter would never end, it did. That day was the last day of proper winter. From one day to the next the sun set in a sky that was light blue, pink, and orange, and winter dusk turned into blue twilight. The snow on the roofs dripped all day in the sun, and huge, lethal icicles hung from every roof.

  Leigh’s replacement finally arrived. Her name was Sally, a librarian and writer from rural Canada. She was well read, ironic and self-deprecating, with nervous habits and large, anxious brown eyes. I took her to the cinema in Haapsalu—My Girl—and to dinner at the Rootsi Kohvik. She was a little disorientated, and had clearly come on a whim, to get away from someone or something. She had met a little boy that morning in the village who answered “hello” back to her greeting. She was cheered up by his knowledge of English until she heard him practising behind her, “Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.”

  She talked already about people not smiling at her, or greeting her. This was tricky, I knew. Leaving my flat was always an exercise in small gestures: How far away must a person be for greetings to be unnecessary? From what distance can you perceive a nod? How to acknowledge people, and how to be acknowledged, was problematic for all the foreigners—for Leigh and Sally, the Estonian impassivity seemed hostile. I felt a mild sense of solidarity from our shared northern apartness but smiled too much, as did Katarina. Virve, being Finnish, did better. If there was a good reason to smile she did, otherwise not. Sally, more fragile than any of us, found that the lack of warmth wore her down.

  Independence Day in Estonia is 24 February. At eleven o’clock people gathered in the stone-cold culture hall, all the schoolchildren and thirty-five or so adults, including the teachers. The school orchestra, the children’s choir, the women’s choir, and the students’ dance team performed; three girls read poems, and we sung the complex and difficult national anthem. Proceedings were interrupted twice by Ruth, who made several generally unwelcome religious speeches. Her grandson, Samuel, who was conducting the orchestra, walked out at one point, looking tense and drawn. People applauded lamely after the first speech, but during the second one a small elderly man, usually drunk, though not, I think, on this occasion, tried to stop her, as did Samuel, and she slightly shortened her speech. The man, she told me later, was a “notorious communist.” Magnus, one of my best students, was the standard bearer, and carried the flag up on the stage, grinning self-consciously. Ülo, the mayor, made a speech about the hard work of independence, and Laine, the headmistress, spoke, unexpectedly thanking Virve, Katarina, and me. We had to go up to the stage to receive Estonian plastic flags and be applauded. Virve and I struggled out of our coats for the sake of decorum, whilst Katarina calmly strolled up in her hideous pink ski jacket and red Helly Hansen mittens.

  Later there was Spumante, coffee, cakes, and chocolates in the school. Laine, a manifestly insincere expression on her face, told me that I had now seen how they feel that Estonia is its own country. Virve, listening in, looked inscrutable. She didn’t think much of Laine’s patriotism, and told me later that the year before Ivar had been organising it, and at the last minute went on a trip to Viljandi with some other people instead of attending his own event. The celebration would have come to nothing if Selma, the school accountant, hadn’t stepped in and made a speech about her childhood in pre-war independent Estonia, and about the Soviet times, and how things were now. We drank the Spumante and the coffee, and ate the cakes, and life went on. My plastic Estonian flag stood on my kitchen table for a while, then disappeared.

  In March the school organised an excursion for the teachers to a swimming pool outside Haapsalu. They must have run out
of chlorine for the pool; the cloudy water smelled indefinably musty. It had an even dirtier foot bath, which everyone nimbly sidestepped. The atmosphere was exuberant, though. Vladimir Belovas, Laine’s husband, was there, in tight swimming trunks. He and Alar, in equally tight trunks, played a ball game in the pool, diving like sleek dolphins. I found Vladimir later alone in the sauna, a big man with an indifferent gaze. He had been the director of the collective farm, and now he was running a garage in Haapsalu. I introduced myself.

  “I know who you are,” he said, and fell into a moody silence.

  A day or so later I had Katarina and Sally over for dinner—a cobbled together hasty meal of spaghetti and tomato sauce. I accidentally poured red wine into Katarina’s glass of grapefruit juice. Katarina laughed, as did I, but Sally looked on guard, round brown eyes wide open.

  “What have you been drinking?” she said. “You are completely smashed.”

  Later we went for a walk to look at the pulsating stars in the black night. It was, again, icy cold. Winter had returned, after that false spring. One day in early March I set off in the snow to meet Ruth, who was coming with me to Leida and Lydia’s. She wasn’t by the cowsheds as we’d agreed, but I eventually found her outside. As we ploughed through the snow towards the car she started to explain an Estonian point of grammar to me, precise and patient as ever. We reached the car and were on our way. Within a few minutes the wind picked up, and it started snowing again. Soon we were in a violent snowstorm, an actual blizzard. I drove cautiously on until Ruth said that we shouldn’t continue, that the snowdrifts would be impassable nearer Einby. The storm, by then, felt actually dangerous, the wind whipping up deep drifts of snow on the road. Just after we turned we got stuck. Ruth got out to push, but to no avail. Snowflakes whirled across the windscreen. Eventually Ülo drove by and pushed us free. I tried to get Ruth to come home with me, but she sauntered off into the snow, with the cheese I had given her, casually waving a hand goodbye without turning her head.

  Two days later, 8 March, was Virve’s birthday, which coincided with International Women’s Day, too associated with the Soviet Union to be celebrated anymore. I asked Alar what they used to do. “Flowers to the ladies,” he said, smiling ironically. Laine made a speech in the teachers’ room, both about Virve and Women’s Day. Ivar made a speech, lost on most of us, about how really we should celebrate tomorrow instead, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the German Social Democratic Party. Alar and the bus driver handed a flower to each woman from a pot on behalf of all the men, a post-Soviet ironic joke.

  “Can you imagine,” Katarina said, “I asked my students why they thought there was a Women’s Day, and not one of them replied.” Yet more proof for her of what a long way they had to go, rather than what a long way they had come.

  Later in the evening we had a party for Virve. It followed its usual course. Alar told me about Veino. “The man with the dog,” he said, and I remembered him as the fat man with a dirty straw-blond fringe, tiny dog on a leash. He was the only one who ever kept a dog on a leash. “This man,” Alar said, “deals in vodka, any time, night or day, if you have a vodka problem go to him. He sells a big bottle for thirty kroons only.” He looked at me expectantly, and I exclaimed politely.

  He also told Katarina about a small shop that sold very cheap alcohol and cigarettes—a “black market shop,” Katarina later called it.

  “What do you mean a ‘black market shop’?” I said. “There is no black market anymore.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean, where they dump the prices, smuggled goods . . .” She trailed off, and then changed the subject to the family packs of Swedish steel wool she had sent for, and which had just arrived. She had already polished the metal sink in her kitchen until it shone like a beacon.

  Alar and Heli were always looking for a deal. They moved like fish in the water from shop to shop, looking for cheap deals. Only once did I see them sad about shopping, which otherwise was satisfying for them, and that was when their son, Karl, suddenly started to walk and needed shoes. They found out that the shoes cost 160 kroons in Haapsalu, far more than they could possibly afford.

  “It’s a monopol”, Heli said sadly.

  They decided they had to go to Tallinn to compare prices, or even to Tartu because Tartu was cheaper than Tallinn.

  The current of assimilation was tugging at me. At the same time, reading my diary now, I see a recurring note of a crisis of meaning underneath the mild struggle of everyday life. I heated water on the wobbly stove for washing, I shopped and cooked (a little), I cleaned, I taught. I felt almost constantly ill, with one thing or another. Just getting by seemed to take up almost all my time. Spring, by now, was ­really starting. The storks came back, and settled in their old nest by the dairy. The snow was practically all gone, and after three warm and sunny days the insect and bird life suddenly returned. Equally suddenly, the children were outside again, playing and shouting in the long twilight, until there was an almost deafening din echoing between the blocks of flats. One day someone burnt the old brown grass strewn with rubbish between the block, and the children kept up their own private fires deep into the night.

  There was an undercurrent, too, of something quite eerie about that spring—something about feeling exposed after the deep privacy of winter: hearing the children half sarcastically and half sweetly call out long, drawn-out “haaallloooos” after me; being woken at three A.M. by sudden and violent knocks on my door, followed by the sound of people running downstairs, laughing. They were teasing me. I think now that they also knew more about me than I thought—the anonymity I took for granted was, I think, gone within weeks of my being there, maybe even earlier.

  In the beginning I heard there was a rumour that I had taken the name Rausing to conceal my identity of von Rosen, a descendant of the former owners of the estate, who had left sometime after the first revolution of 1905. By a strange coincidence I had actually considered taking the name Rosen, conveniently similar, to conceal the identity of Rausing.

  I didn’t take another name in the end, and the von Rosen rumour didn’t last long. I learnt later that they soon knew who I was and where I was from, but few people ever mentioned it. One day, an Estonian newspaper cutting about my family, in connection with some charitable donation, was posted on the noticeboard in the teachers’ room. I surreptitiously removed it the same night, and because no one ever mentioned it again I almost forgot it. But I don’t think they forgot it. They were just habitually discreet.

  NINE

  Normal Life

  At the end of March I came back to the collective farm—I thought of it as “home” now—from a day in Tallinn. Veevi had been to Helsinki, to visit friends from before the war. She hadn’t been there since that time. When I asked her how it was, she said it was quite “normal,” and told me about an organisation of widows of artists her friend was involved in. She had seen exhibitions, gone to talks, taken in the culture. It was as “normal” as Tallinn was still “not normal.”

  I walked to the village of Österby that cold spring night, in the late lingering sunset and twilight, past the shadowy grey houses and the sketchy silhouettes of bare trees. Near Linnamäe, a stork flew over the field. There was a man and child in green boots on the road. The child climbed a milk stand, holding the man’s hand. He had a cigarette in his mouth. They walked slowly past me.

  Daniel Miller had encouraged me to write a synopsis of an “imaginary thesis” and send it to him, and I did, focusing on the signs of Swedishness in the village: “The public signs hint at a process by which the Swedish heritage is being re-appropriated and staged as a show inspired by a genuine wish to move towards the West, and a fear of isolation and impoverishment,” I wrote, followed by an eleven-page outline. I had ten prospective chapters, with detailed notes, and a timetable. I sound so confident, until the end, when I added, “Please criticise as much as you want since it’s a
ll as liminal, transitional and uncertain as its subject.”

  Daniel wrote back. “Unlike conventional ethnography,” he wrote, “you do not set a present against a represented past, but show a good sense of the historical conditions and present debates that not only construct new pasts today for measuring the present against, but also did so in the past with Swedish revivalist movements.” It was hastily written, I understood that, and I knew what he was getting at. He wrote two more pages, gave me good suggestions for reading, and many comments, some of them critical: “Occasionally you get a bit too glib as in the idea of a symbolic drama in liminal stages of transition. I confess this did not appeal to me (but then I don’t really like Turner).” I read his comments slowly, deciphering. It was the end of Turner, of course, but I wondered also if the whole of my imaginary thesis was too theoretical. I felt tired, and turned to my books, crammed onto the shelf next to Inna’s glass animals. I counted them—124 books. Was it too many? I wondered. I already felt at times like I was merging into the identity of a teacher in the village, just trying to get by—was I also reading and writing too much, instead of “doing fieldwork”?