Everything is Wonderful Read online

  They were, I think, playing with the Swedes, but at the same time, the struggle with drink actually was the most important social issue on the peninsula. Casual labour was divided into drinkers and nondrinkers, and the latter were paid more, as a matter of course. Österblom’s struggle against alcoholism on Ormsö, and Nymann and Pöhl’s temperance society in Noarootsi, had been long since forgotten. The only temperance discussion, other than the above, that I ever heard on the collective farm was when Mart Niklus, the former dissident and MP, visited. He wouldn’t drink vodka, which he associated with the brutality of the guards of the labour camp where he was incarcerated for sixteen years. Apart from him, every­one drank, even Ivar, and Felix Sedman was right: many people, mostly men, were drinking themselves to death.

  At this time two friends from England, Tara and Karen, came out for a visit, and we travelled by car through Estonia and down to Latvia. First we visited Paldiski, the Russian military base. The first checkpoint we came to was manned by a Moldovan, a small man with a black moustache, tunic open, who came hurrying out after he’d seen us take pictures. We had a reasonably friendly conversation with him, whilst his brutal-looking sidekick stood leaning against the door of the hut. When we left, he called us back to ask for cigarettes, and would only take two although Karen offered him a whole packet. We drove on through the town, past the unrenovated high-rises, trees lining the road, Russian troops walking by.

  The next checkpoint was guarded by a single Estonian, and I asked if we could look around. He asked somebody else over the intercom system, and the permission came out loud and crackly, improbably in tune with the surroundings. The barracks, once solid, perhaps even beautiful, were now completely dilapidated. The Estonian soldier showed us around as if he hadn’t seen the inside of the buildings himself, curiously looking into every room. The assembly room, about thirty meters long, was supported by pillars covered in a coarse mosaic depicting the themes of the Soviet nations—it was like finding the archaeological remains of a past empire. Other rooms had broken chairs and rusty beds in them, and old Soviet frescoes on the walls gradually merging with the background colour. The exercise ground was outside the barbed wire of the camp, full of rusty structures, some covered in rotting cloth; a war aesthetic.

  Leaving the base, we followed the dirt road, and eventually reached the harbour. A Russian war ship was leaving the dock. Armed soldiers stood on board watching the shoreline recede. The sea was rainbow with fuel, and an Estonian soldier on a bicycle was idly watching the ship go out. That was the last we saw of Pal­diski, and we left by a dirt road that led all the way back to Rickul and Noarootsi. Whilst we were still on the mainland, a young elk, heavy and clumsy, cantered across the road right in front of us on uncertain legs.

  The next morning we drove to Pärnu, and then on to Riga. We drove down dusty wide boulevards, looking at house facades with dramatic and artistically painted adverts, children begging, and men looking at us appraisingly. We parked outside the hotel. A man in worn-out clothes and small green eyes in a tired face, asked us for money for the parking, mentioning the Mafia, and the need to protect the car against attacks, when we hesitated. We paid up.

  The Russian church in Riga, which had been partially turned into a planetarium in the Soviet era, was being restored. The icons, which had been left, were still covered with a patina of grime and dust. Outside, children were begging next to bent old women in dirty grey headscarves. The main boulevard led up to a blue high-rise, the Hotel Latvija, multicoloured strings of lights in the trees lining the road. The Russian on the formerly bilingual street signs had been roughly painted over with grey paint. Our destination, a synagogue on a back street, was closed, and instead we went to the top of a church tower. The fencing at the top was rusty and unsafe. We stood there, looking out over Riga. It really was another country.

  The next day we drove out to Salaspils, the former concentration camp set in the eternal pine forests of the Holocaust. The camp was demolished long ago, and in 1969 it was turned into a Soviet monument. Some fifty thousand people were killed there, Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. There was a stone memorial of huge, gaunt figures. In front was a dark, low slab of stone, a steady echoing sound emanating from it, like a prison door swinging in the wind: the symbolic time keeping of the camp. There were some sodden flowers on the stone. A man cycled slowly across the camp, a shortcut to the village, perhaps. It was a grey rainy day. Shockingly, JUDEN RAUS graffiti in the primitive lavatories.

  Estonia seemed so mild and idyllic, so comforting, in comparison with Latvia. We stopped in Tartu, the university town, and had dinner in a restaurant with an enormously formal waiter. A woman was playing the piano in a dilapidated house, window open to the blue evening. She turned towards us as we passed. The old university buildings reminded me a little of the Swedish university town of Lund, where I grew up. It was quiet and peaceful. We must have stayed somewhere along the way, but I have no memory of that now, and no note of it in my diary. Coming back to the collective farm the next morning felt like coming home. There was Alar and Heli, and Karl, the toddler, in a harness being walked. Katarina, in improbably ugly orange sunglasses, came over to say hello. Sally, much recovered from a reclusive spell, came for a visit later. I was happy to be back.

  Soon after this trip I started to give English lessons for adults. As my students left, I would hear them call to each other “bye-bye,” laughing. I knew them all. Eve from the post office, who took it more seriously than anyone else, had been almost in tears with frustration about pronunciation. I recognised her frustration only too well from my own Estonian lessons. I had never before had the sense that English was difficult to pronounce, I suppose because I always heard it so much, but for them it was different. In Estonian pronunciation is predictable from the spelling, and they found the gap between what they read and what they heard in English difficult. Also, in Estonian, the exact pronunciation determines both meaning and case form: unlike English, it’s not a forgiving language. I told Eve that a global language has so many different accents that pronunciation inevitably matters less than in Estonian, but I don’t think she believed me.

  On the eve of Mayday there was the dress rehearsal for lighting the midsummer fires. I waited for an hour and a quarter in the rain for the bus with Ivar and a friend of his, Allan, the director of the historical museum in Haapsalu. Allan was researching the bureaucracy of the Soviet mass deportations in 1941 and 1949. He had, as I remember it now, studied history with Ivar at Tartu, and they had remained friends. The rehearsal was chaotic and elemental, a huge fire in the rain, spits of flame whipped up by the gusts of wind shooting towards the sea.

  Later, wet through, we went back to Ivar’s flat. I hadn’t seen it before. It was unexpectedly beautiful, with stripped dark wood and orderly bookcases with interesting titles, books that looked read. I remember dancing by myself waiting for them to come back from the bar to get a bottle of vodka. More aware than I was of how much people gossiped in the village, Ivar didn’t want me to come with them to buy it. Then we played roulette on a flimsy cardboard set. Ivar won three times in a row, decisively whirling the little plastic wheel.

  In May I went to England for a week to see my mother, who had broken her ankle. I flew back into Tallinn, and retrieved my car. A tanned elderly man in the hut by the parking field slowly counted up the days I’d been away. Standing there on the wooden steps in the sunshine, I was struck again by the peace of Estonia. I slowly drove back to Pürksi, little Ladas gliding past each other barely accelerating, the sun beating down, a hallucinatory shimmer on the road. I stopped at the ruins of the great manor house about an hour outside Tallinn, and walked around for a while. I had been there with Leigh before—this time it looked not so much tragic and beautiful as sad and dirty. There was a pile of broken bottles on one side, and the park behind the house, which had looked magnificent in its decline, now looked scruffy. It was peaceful nonetheless, with an unpretent
ious kolkhoz living block right in front, and a few vegetable plots on the left. Some people were standing around, talking, looking, and then not looking.

  For moments I was taken aback that I understood exactly what they were saying. This had started already in London, when two Estonian women had boarded the plane in front of me. They were casually chatting—“. . . and of course this was my first time in London . . .”—and I understood everything. Briefly, it felt like having been given the magical power of understanding birdsong, understanding what I intuitively felt I shouldn’t, the banality of another world, beneath the exotic veneer of otherness. It was as if I had expected that that week in England would have robbed me of everything to do with Estonia, taking away all the insights, memories, knowledge, and ideas. It was, after all, so strange, so different from my normal life, to be there, on that collective farm in the former Soviet Union. So strange and yet so normal, so very ordinary.

  At the same time, on the collective farm I often feared that I would forget my time in England, and, particularly, that my English would gradually disappear. I was sinking back into something like Swedishness, a Swedishness as foreign as my own, and therefore paradoxically familiar. Most people on the collective farm were not Swedish, but the people who were searched for words in the same way I sometimes did. We had in common that we were minorities, fluent in the majority language, mother tongue hidden inside us.

  I stopped off to do some shopping on the mainland, and that, too, was pleasantly familiar: an unsmiling young man holding out a basket for me, scrubby women and red-faced men, spare and thrifty purchases, quick queues. Later I saw Sally on the square. She was unexpectedly tanned, and told me she had decided to leave. No surprises there. I saw Katarina, too, who now had short hair, a blond helmet like my dark one, but otherwise looking much the same.

  The light was intense, almost a pure white. There were flowers and greenery all around. Already I missed the bleakness of early spring, the sketchy silhouettes of the trees against twilight evenings, the pallor and fragility of the April light. That night I went for a walk late in the evening, after eleven, and it was still dusky, with the remains of a pale orange sunset, the moon a full quarter by the evening star, a mist over the low-lying fields. Standing on the road listening to the cacophony of birds, echoing like in a jungle, thinking about the sound of dinosaur worlds, a stork flew past me on its way to the nest on the chimney of the old dairy.

  That night I had a dream: I was walking on a savannah at sunset. It was improbably beautiful, as though dusted with gold. I was watching a pair of eagles slowly circling in the sky; I knew they were enormously rare. I saw them descend towards a pit, their home, and I walked towards them. Two British birdwatchers were hiding nearby, wiry and bespectacled observers with binoculars. They beckoned me over, whispering that I had to be very quiet. The two birds were standing now. They hadn’t seen us. I was struck by their ordinariness; they were bird-people, but the bird-woman’s hair was bleached and permed, forming a strange contrast to the extraordinary beauty and exoticism of the vision of them slowly circling. It was a man and a woman, and they had human bodies, naked, with eagle wings folded, but also tied on, behind their arms. They were a parallel species, not quite human.

  It struck me that this dream was about my fieldwork: the grandeur of the theoretical framework, the extraordinary beauty of the country, the spectators with their lenses, the levels of theoretical interpretation, and the ordinary poverty of life in the village.

  After no BBC World Service for eight months, I turned the radio on to hear a snatch of dialogue: “. . . and how much does one of these cost?” “Five pounds.” “And it’s small enough to carry away in a pocket, isn’t it?” “Yes, it is.” And then the voices faded out again. From my window I could see small children playing by themselves in the yard, unaware of being observed, leaning on the swing, investigating the ground, turning and trotting down the little path that cut off a corner of the grassy patch. The swallows and house martins dived and played in the wind, a door banged, a draught moved through the room.

  Katarina and I went to the church service for Ascension Day. There were twenty-nine women in the congregation, mostly elderly, and a single elderly man. The church was white and a mild grey green, with irregular windows. The central aisle was made of broad flagstones, and the high-backed benches were constructed from painted grey planks. The service was given by a Finnish pastor, pale and ardent, his sermon translated into Estonian by an Estonian pastor. Katarina, objecting, as ever, to symbolic and complex arrangements, whispered, “Can you understand why they come here? It seems so unnecessary, if you see what I mean.”

  I was thinking of other things. We were praying, and I looked at the Bible, published by the Estonian church in exile in cooperation with the Estonian church in Canada in 1991. I read some passages, and listened to the prayers, thinking of the Anglican prayer: “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table . . .” I thought of the taste of the wine, the crucifix, and the old model ship hanging from a beam in the Norman church where I first heard those words. I looked down at the drops of paint that had fallen on the rough plank floor under the pews. They seemed to symbolise something about Christianity at its best, a humility that is not false, a humanity and simplicity.

  A younger woman, Eve, came over to speak to us afterwards. She was a friend of Amie Sügis, the MP from the health school whom I had already met. Writing this now, it occurs to me how many people had the same name on the collective farm. There was Inna, my first landlady, and Inna, the second one. There was Inna’s Toivo, and Toivo the gamekeeper. There was also, confusingly, Alar the English teacher, and Allan the museum director; Veevi in Tallinn, and Virve in the village; Eve who ran the post office, and the Eve we met at the church. The latter Eve invited us back with her to visit Amie’s health school, a new building, heated by wood stoves. I was interested to see it, so we went with her. She also showed us the garden and told us about the organic pesticides, gesticulating precisely, her intense blue eyes shining, invigorating and cheerful.

  Afterwards we went on to Eve’s own home, a house built in 1972, with a thatched roof and an old stove in the kitchen. She had five children. The older son was carrying his baby sister around like a parcel, the baby gurgling and grimacing. In the kitchen a man—whom I assumed to be her husband—was eating mashed potatoes and cabbage out of a tin bowl with bread and milk. Eve cut us each a piece of the unsalted bread; it crumbled like cake in my hand. The children watched, the man ate in silence, and Eve talked and talked. Outside two heifers licked our hands with long grey tongues. A little calf, removed from its mother, rested nearby. There were hens crowded into a dirty enclosure, and a fat grey cat that came running when Eve called. There was a telephone, too, sitting on the steps of the house.

  Later she took us along to Amie’s house, an old log house that had been pulled down and rebuilt in the 1920s. A thin man with a washed-out moustache was sitting at the table eating dry potatoes from a tin bowl. Sügis herself was in bed in the other room, exhausted by a bout of fasting. She was lying on three pillows under an embroidered shawl, cheeks red, eyes blurred, but she was lucid and coherent. We talked about the house, her experiments with organic pesticide, and the school. There was such a strange juxtaposition of old-fashioned poverty, self-imposed fasting, the quiet struggle of farming, and organic ideology there.

  I had been curious about her for some time. Toivo, I knew, had a gripe with her because she hadn’t paid him for some work he had done and, adding insult to injury, had told Inna what to feed the children (“Estonian vegetables”). After our conversation, Eve took us around the garden, and showed us the old sauna and the fields beyond the house. A young woman in a cardigan was spreading earth over seed potatoes in the cold wind.

  It was spring, and the visitors were returning like migrating birds. On the way back we met some returning Swedes, a woman of about sixty with snow-white ha
ir, and two men in a Volvo. One of the men told me his life story, of orphanages, foster homes, and the sea. The woman spoke Estonian with Eve in that particular Swedish accent, neutralising all the clipped consonants and the drawn-out vowels. This was my family home, she said, pointing to a derelict log house by the side of the road.

  We went on to visit Irma, a Swedish old lady, a relative of Eve’s. The conversation was halting. Eve, nursing the baby on the bed in the corner, couldn’t quite understand why—she kept looking eagerly from one of us to the other, making encouraging signs. She didn’t know that we had met before, and that Irma then had declined to be interviewed for my fieldwork, and that we were now both embarrassed by that. She eventually brought out a box of photos, a mix of old black-and-white portraits, colour snapshots with various Swedish relatives, as well as a few pictures from relatives in Sweden, outside and inside their ordinary comfortable Swedish homes. The photos looked strange in this cottage, which couldn’t have changed much since the war, with its iron bedstead, table, and two chairs.

  “They have a good life over there,” she said, and laughed a little bitterly.

  She took us outside to see her cows. Two were hers, and one she had received from the kolhoos herd when it was broken up. She had two calves as well, kept in a dirty pen, one of them slow and unwell. “Are you a bit poorly?” she said to the sick one, but he only bent his head and stood still.

  She offered me a sauna then. It was still warm, she said. It was, in fact, only lukewarm, but there was some hot water in a bucket and a small piece of brown soap. She got me a towel and two birch branches to whip myself with, which I did half-heartedly, until I saw a green translucent little creature walking unsteadily across my thigh.

  Sitting in that sauna I thought of forms of knowledge—­concrete knowledge like how to milk a cow or dye eggs with onion skin, and experiential knowledge like the scent of the birch leaves in the sauna, spicy and strong. I thought, also, of the accumulation of meaning, and the images that lay behind the words of poverty: wood stoves, small iron beds, old clothes, sores around the mouths of children, tin buckets with water, old pieces of brown soap, potatoes and cabbage. The vodka of hardship, lined dark faces, glazed eyes, clothes melting onto the body, dirty hands red and cut. Those words are so meaningful if you have seen the reality of it, and lived with it, and so empty if you have not. And now, so many years later, the meaning is gradually leaching out of the words. I am forgetting.