Everything is Wonderful Page 17

  TEN

  Everything Is Wonderful

  Katarina’s birthday was at the end of May. We sang for her in English and in Estonian at school. I gave her dinner—tinned mussels from Sweden in a white wine and cream sauce, substituting Russian champagne for the wine, and soft cheese for some of the cream, which was past its sell-by date in the shop. Katarina talked about being pregnant and having children.

  “Of course I worked the whole time—we do in Sweden—but it was lovely. You never regret having children. You can’t because once they are born they are there, and you love them automatically.”

  There was a cold, dry wind and a glaring light outside, even late in the evening. Midsummer, and the white nights, were approaching.

  We visited the island of Saaremaa with its medieval town, Kuressaare. The little town was startlingly neat and tidy. Even the woodpiles were neatly stacked, sometimes in pleasant decorative patterns, and the old co-op shop had all the goods stacked and lined up to the millimeter. We were staying with an old work friend of Inna’s, an ambulance driver, from the time she worked as a dispatcher in Pärnu. When we finally arrived we were given dinner, by which time Katarina and I were so hungry we’d spent the latter half of the journey making up menus, an old childhood game of my father’s. The dinner was delicious—kotlet with potatoes, and two kinds of pickles. There was a conformity about Estonian food that mirrored other conformities: the language with its set phrases used again and again, the flats with their ever-present wall units and sofas, the collective farms themselves, the clothes, the styles, the looks. Variety came mainly from want: the inability to keep up, clothes kept together with pins, dirty hair, the stale air of poor flats.

  Inna’s friend, whose name I now can’t remember, was tall, angular, and humorous, very much a contrast to Inna, so round and brown with sad eyes. She lived with her son and Belarusian daughter-in-law—they had met at marine college in Russia. There was a black-and-white photograph of them in the front room, two thickset blond people with flared jeans looking gravely into the camera, standing very near each other, on a street with tall white houses in the background—not, I think, in Estonia. Now they had two little girls, looked after by their grandmother.

  The house was built in 1974. They built it themselves, without a flushing lavatory, and with washing facilities only in the sauna, from a cold tap behind a curtain, though they did get around the regulations to make it a bit bigger than it should have been. There was a large garden, too, half of it a vegetable plot. They had chicken and pigs, a small dog, and a huge black Newfoundland, young and excessively friendly. He had no papers, Inna’s friend said, but some experts had come to look at him, and were going to write out a certificate authenticating his breed. The small dog, scruffy and full of fleas, was chained; the Newfoundland, Cherry, slept outside the sauna at night. Large bones were scattered around the garden. The little girls ran up to Cherry, hugging him and shouting endearments in his ear as he stood stock-still, tail sinking.

  Later we went for a cold but wonderful walk. The sun was setting over an inlet, the castle stood dark and solid in the background, the streets were quiet. The old wooden houses with carved verandas were so beautiful in the blue evening light. Cats lying on the woodpiles watched us as we walked by, overtaken by old people riding slowly past on rusty bicycles. There was music coming from the windows of run-down houses; children were playing in the streets.

  The next day we went for a drive. We passed two houses, yards untidy and unkempt. “Look at that,” said our host, as so many Estonians had said to me. “That is how the Russians live.”

  We stopped at a lake, where I swam, alone, in the cold clear water. Our destination was an old farm, now a museum. The previous farmer, according to a pamphlet in English, had “agreed to assign most of the ethnographical necessaries preserved in the farm to the state free of charge.” That was in 1959. “The first worker of the museum was Jakob Reht (the farmer in question) who until his death in 1969 kindly acquainted the guest with the exposition of the farm.” Afterwards we saw the church and some shops, similar to the two shops in Pürksi, and then we had coffee in a Soviet-style café. The others had coffee and cake; I had a “pizza,” a small, round, faintly rancid disk. There was only us and two drunk men. They got up as we did, walking unsteadily down the main street.

  On the way home we saw a hedgehog hurrying across the street. “What is it called in English?” asked Inna, and I was just going to say the word, when I realised I couldn’t remember. I knew it had something to do with pigs, but all my mind would come up with was “guinea pig.” I was in between going blank and simply having forgotten. I knew I would know it instantly if I was told, but I also felt a deeper sense of alienation that made me think of my relationship to English as a secondary, learnt language: at some point I must have consciously learnt the word “hedgehog” from the Swedish word igelkott, and at some point later I must have transferred the sense of congruity between the animal itself (the signified) and the word (the signifier) from Swedish to English, from igelkott to “hedgehog.” Now they both feel possible: igelkott playful and poetic, “hedgehog” more prosaic but also somewhat more descriptive. Igelkott is a smaller, blacker, and wetter image than hedgehog, the inside more than the outside; a snail more than a pig.

  I slept intermittently that night, and dreamt heavily. Before we left the next morning, I looked at a book on the table, on Soviet Estonian art, in English:

  The turning point in the evolution of artistic thought, the ebbs and flows of creation are all connected in highly complicated ways with the crucial points of history. It might be difficult to find art events which, if aligned in a chronological sequence would correspond to the critical dates of the last forty-five years. But there still is a connection. It lies deeper than a row of dusty archives dates. It is the mental connection. As a sensitive measuring device, art reacts to the changes in the spirit of society, recording what is new and at the same time trying to compensate for deficiency . . .

  Those were complicated years. A number of things were not understood, and many things were misunderstood. But those were the contradictions that are inevitably typical of every progressive movement.

  Soviet texts were always hypocritical and comforting in equal measure, comforting in the same way that the school books were comforting: cheerful and coherent; a facade of good intent; the cotton-wool reality of censorship.

  At the end of May a rumour went around the village that Sally had disappeared. We knocked on her door, often, and looked for her. It didn’t occur to any of us to call the police—I had never seen any police on the peninsula. Several days later she emerged, startled by the attention. She had been there all the time, in retreat. She invited me for coffee, and talked about the book she was writing, about Canada, about being a librarian, and about being here. She had randomly picked up this teaching job, I can’t remember how, and come over without any connection to Estonia, or an organisation like the Peace Corps. Her flat, similarly, was untouched; she lived so lightly in it. As I stood in the door to leave, she casually picked up a broom and brushed some dust under the rug in the hallway. I looked on in fascination—I had never imagined I would see anyone actually brush dust under the carpet. The act seemed to live on only as an expression of concealment, but here it was. “Oh, I do it all the time,” she said, laughing. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  The next day was the birthday of the school cook. Unlike the teachers’ birthdays, always celebrated with a full quorum of teachers, cake, and coffee, her birthday was only casually celebrated. She came to the teachers’ room, tall and heavy, her face red and eyes slightly bleary. We didn’t sing, though we did eat cake, and everyone shook her hand. She was not, I noted, drunk. It was a grey and windy day. It seemed that every day then was windy. Two women were working on the field behind the block of flats opposite mine, bending down, moving slowly over the earth. Shortly afterwards Katarina
got an acute toothache. I asked Ivar about the dentist, and he said that there was no dentist here.

  “How odd,” I said, “since the Åtvidaberg correspondence shows that dentistry equipment was sent. Asked for, actually.”

  “Yes, but it would be too expensive to have a dentist here. There’s not enough need.”

  The dentistry equipment was lost, I assumed, sold or stored somewhere. Katarina went to Haapsalu instead, and a dentist there pulled out her tooth, without any anaesthetic. She was brave like that.

  In the beginning of June Sally left, and so did Katarina. Sally gave me her Cowboy Junkies tape, appropriately haunting. I spent an hour fixing my leaky piping under the sink with some duct tape she had also given me—it half worked. She had adopted a white cat. It was now at a loose end, searching for food by the rubbish bins. Soon after they left, midsummer arrived and, with it, the revived tradition of a midsummer bonfire. We had rehearsed for this, in a howling rainstorm, and now, again, there was a storm. The huge fire was so beautiful, whipped by the wind and the rain, the stormy sea in the background.

  The evening before Toivo, the gamekeeper on the peninsula, had asked me to go and have a shashlik (a Russian kebab) with him in the bar by the harbour, of roe deer he’d shot himself. I had met him before, when I conducted my survey, flat by flat. He was kind, I remembered, explaining words I didn’t know, making sure I really understood what he meant. Unlike most people in the village, he had black hair and a black beard, and deep brown eyes. I had been filming a Swedish midsummer event when he asked me. The choir sat on the stage waiting for something or other. I killed a mosquito landing on my cheek. The fire was pointlessly turning into coal, and I was feeling bored. He was standing behind me with two men. They ostentatiously and courteously backed away as I swung the camera around. I smiled, and Toivo came over at once, talkative, friendly. As he turned to go I saw that he was hiding a crushed can of Gin Long Drink in his hand.

  I went with him to the bar in his pickup truck. We had a beer. His children came in, with wildflowers for me, for midsummer. I refused a second beer: the evening was too thick with atmosphere already. We left earlier perhaps than we otherwise would have done, and went for a drive up the coast on the small dirt roads. It was cold then, and the wind was strong. At one point we drove past three dead cows lying in a heap, swollen and brown. My mouth dried up, looking at them. He had told me about three deaths earlier: his newborn baby, and two friends who had died in Afghanistan. He winced exactly like his namesake Toivo, my landlord, used to: a movement of the mouth, and an incongruous thumbs-up. “That’s life,” he said. “It happens.” Stoic, and brief.

  As he dropped me off outside my building, he kissed me on the cheek, our cheekbones knocking together. I went to my flat, the possibilities of another life tugging, as ever. At midsummer it was never fully dark. Late at night in the dimming light I went for a long walk. I saw an elk, that mysterious heavy being, crashing into the forest, and then a roe deer. I picked seven kinds of wildflowers in a private Swedish midsummer ritual to put under my pillow. As I got back there was an almost full moon hanging above the kolkhoz workshop, a streak of black cloud across it. A black cat was roaming amongst the rubbish bins, a seagull sailing overhead. Everything was quiet.

  The midsummer flowers are meant to make you dream of your future husband. Instead I dreamt about Toivo’s wife. She came down the staircase from Sally’s, where she had been working in a laundry, and greeted me with a friendly smile; one of those dream sequences that are so real that they are hard to distinguish from actual memories.

  The morning after that I saw Toivo from my window carelessly stepping out on the roof of the two-story block of flats at a right angle to mine. He walked halfway down the steep side, with nothing to hold on to and not even a gutter to grab should he stumble, and waved at me from the roof.

  I was copying a video I had made for Virve at Alar and Heli’s. Karl was sleepless, hot and restless. I pressed the top of a perfume bottle against his nose and he laughed, and then pressed his nose against it again and again. They were tired and quiet. We talked about the speech I had made to the group of diplomats who had visited the village. Laine had asked me to speak, together with one of the students, and some of the teachers, but she had made it clear afterwards that she wasn’t very happy with what I had said.

  “I didn’t know what to say. Maybe it wasn’t right, but what should I have said?” I asked Alar and Heli.

  “That everything is all right, everything is wonderful,” said Alar, smiling ironically.

  This is what I said:

  “The fall of the Soviet Union led to a strong wave of interest from social anthropologists. The concurrent critique of Marxism led to questions about how to describe societies—or ­communities —which had, at least partially, and for a long time, described themselves in terms of dialectical Marxism, at a time when those terms were rapidly becoming redundant. There was a movement, therefore, towards fieldwork in the former nations of the Soviet state, in order to investigate the practises of everyday life. I was interested in this because of the possibilities of combining history and anthropology; of trying to write social anthropology, which would take the various historical trajectories into account.

  “This region seemed well suited for the project, in that there was a strong historical component in the form of the culture of the Estonian Swedes. This culture, which was intensely investigated from Sweden in the twenties and thirties, to the point where it was ironically said that every Estonian Swede had become an ethnographic object, is now to some extent going through a second wave of investigation, both from Sweden and from Estonia. There are local attempts to revive the Swedishness—I am thinking both about this school, and the Paslepa Folkhögskola, and the Society of Estonian Swedish Culture, Samfundet för Estlandssvensk Kultur. These attempts constitute, I would argue, both an attempt to reconnect the area with the history of the first republic, bypassing the Soviet era, and an attempt to forge out a future built on these links.

  “The majority of the Estonian Swedes, as I am sure you know, fled to Sweden during the war. The ones who remained became largely assimilated, and certainly the generations after them became almost entirely assimilated. The present schoolchildren, however, learn Swedish, and a degree of what you might call Swedishness, at school, and whilst this doesn’t constitute a process of deassimilation, it might be described as an experiment in reinventing culture. The driving force, however, behind the restoration of Swedishness is not so much a resurrection of the past for its own sake, but rather a process of building a future which is not based on the Soviet past.

  “The link with the Swedish town of Åtvidaberg, which is now twinned with Noarootsi, has resulted in a large amount of aid, mostly clothes and machinery, estimated to exceed a million Swedish crowns, or some hundred thousand pounds. There are also a number of other links with Swedish and Swedish Estonian organisations, as well, of course, as a large number of Swedish Estonian visitors from Sweden, coming back to see their childhood homes. What they see is rather poignant: the old farms, which tend to be run-down or even completely dilapidated; the council blocks built on what used to be an open field behind the old manor house; and the rusty workshops on the other side.

  “This is the aesthetic of the material culture of the Soviet era, which is not so easy to get rid of, and which also reflects the fact that the people in the council blocks are mostly former kolkhozniks, who now see an uncertain future of poverty and unemployment, and who don’t tend to participate in the project of the restoration of Swedishness, which largely takes place within the premises of the school and the local council. They tend to work for the new share-companies, which come and go, or else get by from job to job. These people have, of course, become ‘free’ with the fall of the Soviet Union, but a large number of them have also become ‘redundant,’ in the widest sense of the word.

  “Anthropologists don�
��t tend to deal with the future, just as they don’t tend to deal with the past. The present here, however, is so entirely framed both by the past and the future that it almost doesn’t exist. There is a sense in which people are waiting for the future to happen, stocking up as far as they can against a sense of uncertainty which represents both the actual condition of poverty and the loss of the teleology of the Soviet ideology: that pervasive sense of working towards a goal, which also, of course, was part of the great deception of the state. The Soviet modernity, meanwhile—the modernness of the then nice blocks of flats, the gigantic machinery on the enormous fields—is decidedly over. Equally, however, the pre-war aesthetic of the milk stands along empty dusty roads, and what might be described as the heimat worldview of thrift, order, and belonging, is over, too. In my view the challenge is how to build a future from the violent rupture of the Soviet years without further marginalising the people, who are involuntarily stuck in a quasi-Soviet aesthetic, which can now be reframed simply as poverty.”

  One of the French diplomats came up to me afterwards. “But your English is very good,” he said, surprised. “Do you come from this area?’

  Everybody wore summer clothes except me—I had nothing cooler than jeans and a T-shirt. It was very hot by now, a heatwave that was to last the whole summer. I walked, read, wrote, and continued my survey. I had reached the poor end of the village, long blocks of flats built in the early 1960s with serrated metal stoves for heating, and wood-fired ranges in the kitchen. The people in those flats were a little different—things seemed to have changed less here. The people were not all Estonian either. I interviewed a Tartar woman and an Uzbek man; she spoke some Estonian, he didn’t. Russian was disappearing from Estonia, and this man was gradually becoming trapped in a language he didn’t understand and had little hope or inclination to learn. There was one Russian woman left in the village, and she lived here. She, also, spoke no Estonian, but her neighbours began to translate for me. In the end we all laughed, because she spoke so much, and so quickly. I came back in the evening, and her husband, a big Estonian with a beard and bare chest, answered all my questions again, slowly and precisely.