Everything is Wonderful Page 15

  I needed more data. I visited Leida and Lydia, and asked if I could film them. Leida insisted, as a kind of return gift, informant to researcher, that I write down the Estonian Swedish version of the days of the Easter week: Kråkmåndan, Krubbatisdan, Askonsdan, Skärtorsdan, Långfredan, Bakalaudan, Smaka Söndan.

  “Why Kråkmåndan,” I asked, “like the crow?” Yes. “Why Krubbatisdan?”

  “Man kribbar omkring—you crib around,” said Lydia, and moved her arms like a crawling infant, with an indefinable expression on her face. She was making it up, of course—krubba, in fact, I later read, was a type of sausage, traditionally eaten at Easter. It is in the nature of humans to make things up, to create coherence and connections where there may be none.

  They insisted, as usual, on giving me something real as well. First they tried to insist that I keep the change from the knitting needles I had bought for them. When I refused they said the change was payment for the passport photographs I had taken of them—Lydia had asked me if I could take her photograph since she was applying for a passport, and I had taken her photograph and sent the film to London to be developed, specifying that I needed four passport-sized photographs of the shot of her. Then they gave me a sweet, and insisted that I take the whole box. After that, they had a short consultation about what else they could give me, and whether the homemade pressed meat had set yet so that it was firm enough to give away. I refused, and said I had to go. There were to be no debts, there had to be balance—harmony, or perhaps equality.

  Later I went for a walk, and was struck by the appearance of my footsteps in the snow and mud, showing the way back: surprisingly firm, pointing slightly outwards at the toes, moving steadily onwards. They were like an imagined, or submerged, alter ego, steady of purpose and decisive. I followed, trying to keep up like a child, breaking into half steps and trots, trying to fit foot into foot, backwards merging with forwards, an image, again, of my fieldwork. That night I dreamt about being a teenage runaway, dressed in a tight glittery top and a miniskirt. I was passing through a brothel, a large run-down flat where I was going to have to work as a prostitute; there were scantily dressed young women, dwarves and giants, a circus atmosphere. I ran past the women; they giggled, and moved closer together. I was not, in the dream, one of them—I was much younger, and quite scared. In the end I escaped through a window. There is a link, I see now, between the footprints in the snow, the two selves, and the strange alter ego in the dream: my sense of self was mildly splitting. Not into English and Swedish, as I had imagined it might, but a deeper split to do with agency and purpose versus submission. The footsteps out and the footsteps in. I was there out of my own free will, obviously, but sometimes it also felt like a sentence.

  The next day I went over to Alar and Heli’s. They were tired, and Karl, their toddler, had been ill. I gave them some clothes for him I had found in Tallinn, and a bottle of French brandy, cheap and unknown. Alar launched into a long story of how he’d bought some German whisky in Tartu that was undrinkable, like eau de cologne— “Like old eau de cologne,” Heli interrupted, meaning Soviet eau de cologne, which people did drink, in the absence of vodka—and how he had complained to the Consumers’ Organisation, which had rung the shop for the “quality control papers.” The owner, an Indian, he thought, had said the shop could “make” the papers in an hour—Alar sneered—and the thing ended with Alar getting compensation (£2.50) and the shop being fined.

  Whilst he told me this he was changing Karl, and I was getting increasingly worried about my own unknown bottle of VSOP brandy from Haapsalu. He started to ask me about what was good alcohol and what was bad. When I said I didn’t know he asked how I could not know. And, of course, he was right—how could I not know? My pretence to not know was only a form of cultural relativism. I knew, for instance, that the brandy I had bought was probably not going to be very good, and that the shop where I had found it was not good either. It was what it was: an impulse buy. We had coffee, and he opened it and, to my relief, pronounced it to be “quite normal.” Marika, the vet, came, and brought some buns.

  Marika, their old friend, was in her mid-thirties, with long brown hair and a sensible face. Was she a single mother? I remember her that way, though I never saw her with her child, and she may not have been, but so many women were. We talked, that day, about Easter. I was startled by the fact that they knew nothing about the theology, not even the basic fact that Good Friday memorialises the crucifixion. Having grown up in an atheist home myself, it was the only time that I was really taken aback by the effects of Soviet atheism. I didn’t otherwise notice the fact that there was no religious education in the school, no links to the church, no confirmations or marriages. I was too close to them, culturally, to find it remarkable.

  Heli got an astrology book out, which warned us about possible burglaries. That amused them. Then we talked, or rather I talked, about the Russian coup rumours—they had heard nothing about it, and didn’t care. We talked, also, about the Gloucester murderer, now long since forgotten, but big news then, and they told me of a serial killer in Ukraine, who had killed and eaten more than a hundred women. We talked about illness and peace, about Heli’s alcoholic father and dyeing eggs with onion skin for Easter. Heli and Maris, her daughter, had rashes around their mouths, and I, too, developed the same unspecified rash.

  The next day it rained steadily, and I stayed inside. Looking at people from the window, I realised that it was not easy to tell the women from the men. The vodka man, Veino, was jogging through the rain, little dog on a leash.

  Soon afterwards I went back to Leida and Lydia’s to film them. They talked to the camera about the people leaving for Sweden during the war, and how people from the east, Estonians from Russia, were resettled by the Germans in the area. I wondered what they thought of the newcomers. They were refugees, Leida said, who had lost everything: “They only cried, like us.” She was in tears by now, as was Lydia. As I remember it, they had stayed behind when the other Swedes were evacuated because Lydia was too ill at the time, with polio. They talked more about the deportations, and the general fear of the knock on the door. There were never any letters, they said, from the people who had been arrested. No one knew what happened to them.

  In 1953, after Stalin’s death, there was a mass amnesty of mainly low-level prisoners from the Gulag. Most of them were released into internal exile, unable to come home, and were not exonerated. In 1956, following Khrushchev’s famous speech denouncing Stalinism, “On the Personality Cult and Its Consequences,” many more political prisoners were released. Some, but not all, were exonerated and rehabilitated. Many prisoners who had already been released into exile were also rehabilitated and allowed to go home. There were many posthumous rehabilitations, too.

  Of the people who had been deported from the peninsula, only a few ever came back. The Soviet prisoners’ stories of suffering and survival, of exhausted people dying of hunger and overwork, of eating grass and digging holes in the ground for shelter, never did become very public, even under Khrushchev. After his fall from power in 1964, orchestrated by Brezhnev and others, the hope of liberalisation gradually died away. There were no more mass deportations, but the history of the Gulag was suppressed, and it remained a risky topic of conversation. Political dissidents, of course, were still imprisoned or “treated” in mental hospitals, and many camps were kept open as prison colonies.

  I remember the tears running silently down Lydia’s cheeks. That video is lying in some dusty box now, I don’t know where. Soon they started talking about the collective farm instead.

  “In the beginning,” Leida said, “people didn’t want it.” They associated it with the deportations. “But gradually it got a little better, and people got some pocket money, and cars and tractors started to come, and then people liked the kolkhoz.” It was decades, however, before they were paid a wage. And the Russian troops? They laughed. “They were just nice boys l
ike ours, far from home.” They didn’t mind them.

  After we finished I showed them what we had recorded on the camera, using the earphones. They laughed out loud, Leida standing with her arms slowly waving like wings, rolling backwards and forwards on her feet. “What fun, what fun!” she said, and laughed. They thanked me sincerely, and suggested, again, that they should pay me. I was not surprised. I knew, also, that their monthly pension amounted to 280 kroon for Lydia (£14), and about 300 for Leida (£15). They might—just—have been able to afford to pay me 50 out of that, or £2.50. I refused.

  School resumed after the Easter break. There was cabbage soup for lunch the first day. I had begun teaching voluntary French lessons. I also started to buy Polish washing-up liquid, a compromise improvement, and actually another sign of assimilation, but I stuck to Estonian washing powder. The day I abandoned that would be the day when I was no longer “doing fieldwork”; my position, then, would have become one of assimilation. The children played in the yard, slowly and aimlessly wandering about, hanging on the single swing. A little dog trotted past them, there were seagulls on the field beyond, and wood pigeons on the roof opposite.

  I went for a walk through the fields that first school day, and came upon an abandoned house I had never seen before. I followed a mossy stone wall running next to an icy ditch deeper and deeper into a marshy part of the forest, ending up behind Ruth’s cottage. I sat there for a long time, on a large stone in a meadow listening to the wind, watching the trees bend and the setting sun turn the grass deep green and golden. When I came back I turned on my old TV, which worked only intermittently. I was quite frightened to watch it; sometimes those old Soviet TVs exploded. There was music on, forceful and monotonous at the same time—the sound of Estonia.

  By now I had gotten to know Tiina, whom I still thought of as the new teacher, quite well. She lived with her husband in another town, in an old house. A black stove heated the two rooms on the ground floor. She had no bathroom, but she did have a new microwave, an electric kettle, and a fridge. I visited her there, drinking German instant lemon tea. We talked about Rudolf Steiner and Célestin Freinet pedagogy in the warm sitting room with big plants, a slow and flea-ridden little Schnauzer puppy at our feet. Tiina did not comment on the flees jumping on his back, and neither did I. Outside the window, a meter or so away, was the house extension they were building. It looked like a stage set, the outside not really outside. Her kettle and fridge and microwave, too, made the house feel not quite real, the lack of a bathroom suddenly incongruous.

  A few days later she took me to see her parents, who lived in a villa in Haapsalu, near the “Russian village.” This was a strikingly different part of town: small wooden houses close together, rough and foreign, Russian looking.

  “I don’t understand it,” she said, as Estonians always did, “how they want to live like that.”

  Haapsalu had a population of some fifteen thousand people. Two thousand Russians had already left for Russia. In the Soviet times it was a “closed” town because of the military installations. We drove past those later—camouflaged hangars surrounded by rusty barbed wire, still and abandoned. The military planes, her mother said, used to take off at four in the morning, and there were more stutterers in Haapsalu than anywhere else because of the noise and sleep disturbance. She also said that when the Soviet military left the troops saturated the ground with fuel, so that no planes could land ever again. I didn’t know if that was true.

  Her father was trying to learn English. He owned the kaubahall, the new supermarket, in Haapsalu. Inflation was now 50 percent he said, and interest on loans was 30 percent. I asked if that made business difficult. “No,” he said, adding frankly, “But competition does.”

  The kaubahall was built in the in-between period and still seemed vaguely Soviet, as he did. He used to work in Narva, Leningrad, and Moscow, for a chemical engineering company making parts for the military. I asked what he thought of Boris Yeltsin. “I think he is a typical Russian,” he said heavily, looking very much like Yeltsin himself. They had only two Russian neighbours now (their other Russian neighbours moved to Israel after Estonian independence), two families where the parents were deaf and dumb. There was a strange and tragic symbolism to this: that the only Russians living in the comfortable Estonian part of town were deaf and dumb, outside language, able to assimilate—or so I theorised—through their muteness.

  We went to have lunch in the new Hotel Sport. The restaurant was quite good, new but aesthetically Soviet, like the kaubahall. There were few other customers, but the waitress still consistently brought the wrong things, which the family received patiently, in silence. She brought Cokes instead of orange juices, which they accepted. After some time she came back and asked whether we had asked for kala or kana—fish or chicken. Tiina and her parents politely explained that we had asked for fish. She was gone for a long time and then brought chocolate pudding instead of fish, which they actually sent back. It was all so new, somehow.

  After our long lunch, we drove out to their summerhouse, a wooden hut built like a tent, the slanting roof reaching the ground. We went for a walk amongst the birches and juniper bushes and seagulls, down to the frozen sea, where some islands rose like mirages in the distance. Two white swans flew just above us, and their little brown dog, Monty, named after Jerome K. Jerome’s terrier in Three Men in a Boat, leapt and ran about on the ice.

  In mid-April the wind was still icy. There were days of power cuts, when the water supply, too, ground to a halt. I wrote about taste, about thrift, about cleanliness, normativity, and allegiances. One day I had my hair cut in the village, in a small room painted orange and white, with a basin in one corner, Finnish shampoo and hair spray on a shelf, and a hairdryer. A boy was having his hair cut when I arrived, then it was the turn of the school driver, and then it was my turn. Two children watched me closely as my hair was washed and cut in silence. Then it was dried, with some Finnish setting liquid, so that briefly I looked like my mother had in the 1970s, with an unflattering helmet of brown hair. I passed Katarina on the square outside, and she complimented me, seemingly in all sincerity, on my new haircut.

  That month Ivar took a group of Swedes on a tour of Estonia, and I went with him. It was freezing cold in the early morning, but Ivar was, as ever, happy and energetic. We went to Viljandi, and saw the famous old oak on the ten-kroon note, and a monstrous six-storey piggery with room for twenty thousand pigs—it had not been a success, Ivar said. We went on to the Halliste Holy Anna Church, which had become a symbol for the new independence. A former collective farm director had become religious, and retrained as a vicar. The church had been struck by lightning in 1959, and he raised funds to restore it. Inside it was shoddy and icy. There was a large basement with vast and empty wardrobes, for concerts and so on. The brochure, published in 1990, stated it was built “For God, for the home, for the fatherland”—bad print on cheap paper. From there we drove to Pärnu by the sea, and a beach called Valgerand, “White Beach,” which I accidentally directed us to. Since we were there, we stopped, and walked for a while. It was just after sunset. Huge blocks of ice were churned up together, with the blue sea beyond, a rind of uneven ice above the horizon like a floating island.

  The following day the Swedes met to discuss community development in the village. Ain Sarv, editor of Ronor, and the director of a new Swedish adult education college, a modest development dedicated to educating people about Estonia’s Swedish heritage, was there, as were Laine and Felix Sedman. Ivar chaired the meeting. Ülo was going to be there, but was absent, which was just as well given his recent clash with Felix. Aime Sügis, an MP for whom Toivo occasionally worked, was there, too. She was a woman in her sixties, dignified and intelligent, who ran a “health school” on the peninsula. The meeting was entitled “Perspectives on the Development of the Council.” Local entrepreneurs and “organisers” had been invited, too, but only two people bothered to
respond, and no one turned up. Ivar spoke first. The gist of his talk was that just over half the people working on the peninsula did so without paying any tax. We learnt, also, that the last three-year plan for the community, which was agreed to in 1991, had six aspects: to foster Swedish culture; to support small-scale farming, shooting, environmentalism, and tourism; and to encourage potato farming. Laine, scribbling incomprehensibly on the board, talked about the discussions in 1989 about Noarootsi as a cultural centre: the Estonian Swedish museum in Haapsalu, the Society of Swedish Estonian archives (then housed in Ivar’s home), the library, the Paslepa adult education school, and the health school, she added, as an afterthought, acknowledging Amie. She added sadly that it was a pity that the museum was in Haapsalu and not here.

  Amie then talked about her health school. It was started seven years ago for “health and development.” It charged 200 kroons a week, and the students worked in the garden and kitchen. They advised farmers on health and organic agriculture; on life philosophy; on how to think, breathe, and eat; on stress; and on plant use. The students slept in the attic and in tents. Amie herself slept in the sauna. I couldn’t look at Ivar, who was now enough of a friend to laugh with—the thought of the farmers I had met taking advice on how to think, breathe, and eat was too funny.

  Now it was the turn of the Swedes. One of them proposed creating a tourist village by the sea.

  “Well, someone would have to build it,” Ivar said, before launching into a tirade about the unemployed in the village, so disorganised, so decadent, so alcoholic.

  Another Swede, slightly disapproving of Ivar’s tone, suggested study circles to help the unemployed.

  “They won’t come,” Ivar said. “They’d rather drink.”

  The Swedes looked uncomfortable.

  “They don’t just drink,” Felix Sedman said in his deep voice, “they are drinking themselves to death.”