Everything is Wonderful Page 5

  The mayor and the headmistress of the school were at the forefront of building links to Sweden. The village school was divided between the first nine years, for local children, and the high school, formerly a Soviet language-oriented specialist school with boarding facilities. The two were quite distinct, though it was run as one school and reinvented as a “Swedish” school. The Swedish Council sent a Swedish teacher, as did the Finnish Council. (Swedish is an official language in Finland, and the Finnish Council also had an interest in the Swedes in Estonia.) All the teachers and members of the council went for Swedish language training in the Finnish twin town, the mainly Swedish-speaking Kronoby.

  Laine Belovas, the headmistress of the school, was the wife of the former director of the collective farm, who had retired to run a garage in Haapsalu. They had obviously lost most of their authority with the demise of the collective farm, and rumours of corruption (mink coats, trips to Florida) clung to them. Laine, however, was navigating these difficulties with some skill. Probably about forty-five then, she was blond and handsome, and spoke Swedish well.

  The Swedes who visited the school were always informally dressed. For them, the visit was a field trip to a remote, primitive, possibly even dangerous area, and they arrived dressed for it, in practical and warm clothes. Laine mimicked this informality, wearing clothes during these meetings that she would never wear during the course of an ordinary school day: jeans and sweaters, flat shoes, little or no make-up. Her blond hair, normally elaborately puffed up, was flat and natural. When the Swedes left she turned back to her usual Estonian persona: elegant dress, make-up, stockings and medium-heeled shoes. Dressing down was dressing up, in the world turned upside down.

  In 1993 the future of the collective farm was still uncertain. The land and buildings had been taken over by a transitory privatisation commission. There was talk about turning it into a company, but it was unclear which parts might be involved, or how it could be done. People could potentially buy land, but to my knowledge no one had done so. “Former owners” could, and did, reclaim their farmhouses. Most of the farms had received several claims from Sweden, and there was talk of a new law coming into force ruling that only permanent residents would be able to get their property back. Some people feared that the farmhouses would turn into summer homes for the Swedes. That was hard to imagine in 1993, in that broken, dirt-poor community, where people were leaving every week on rickety Soviet lorries for some new future somewhere else.

  Hard to imagine, also, why people would fear it. The Swedish revival, on the whole, gave hope to the people on the peninsula. In 1989 it had resumed as abruptly as it had ended in 1939. The son of the first headmaster of the Birkas school, Olle Söderbäck, was a member of the town council of the Swedish town Åtvidaberg. He initiated a twin town agreement between Pürksi and Åtvidaberg, which in effect had turned into an aid programme for the village. Thus Pürksi had become, again, a centre for Swedishness, despite the fact that there were actually only a handful of Estonian Swedes left on the peninsula. By the time I got there, there was already a facade of Swedishness in the village. Lorry-loads of furniture, and all kinds of equipment and machinery, had been shipped over. There was a new—and as far as I could tell completely unused—library, stocked with an eclectic assortment of Swedish second-hand books. There was a communal freezer, where people could rent compartments. There were regular shipments of clothes and other things, and charity sales for the villagers, the proceeds going to a fund to benefit the community.

  The most important project in the village was a new woodchip heating system, which was completed towards the end of my stay, after a winter of virtually no communal heating, with outside temperatures dropping to minus 33 degrees centigrade. District heating was standard in the Soviet Union, and under-heating was rarely a problem. In the winter of 1993–94, however, on this collective farm, the heating was intermittent at best. The village authorities continued to issue bills—post-Soviet and therefore unsubsidised—for the nonexistent heat, which most of the villagers patiently paid. Even in September, the school was so cold. The children sat huddled in their coats. By deep winter they were wrapped up in scarves, woolly hats, and mittens, Swedish cast-offs, mostly. I wore, always, jeans, boots, a T-shirt, an old Armani jacket, and a calve-length woollen coat.

  The post office had a Swedish post office sign. The private co-op shop in the village had Swedish supermarket posters in the ­window. Haapsalu, the local town, was full of Swedish advertising posters, often with endearingly tenuous relationships to the goods actually available. Several such posters, for instance, from a reputable and substantial Swedish outlet, confidently promised, in Swedish, “All you need for the heating systems of your home.” Homemade arrows led to the shop itself, a small room, where a few obsolete Soviet electrical instruments were arranged on dusty shelves. I don’t know where they got the posters—perhaps they wrote and asked for them. Like Soviet slogans and the now rusty old Soviet signs, the posters were about identity and ideology, not commerce or even the actual existence of goods for sale.

  History was turning, and the historical process of the revolution was reversing itself. Boris Pasternak describes how Yuri in Doctor Zhivago found the remnants of prerevolutionary shop signs out in countryside. All advertising had long since disappeared in revolutionary Moscow:

  Living in Moscow, Yury had forgotten how many shop signs there still were in other towns and how much of the facades they covered. Some of those he was seeing now were so large that he could read them easily from where he stood, and they came down so low over the slanting windows of the sagging, one-storyed buildings that the crooked little houses were almost hidden by them, like the faces of village children in their fathers’ peaked cap.

  There is a poignancy to those signs of a lost world of solidity and enterprise:

  There were round red oil tanks in the field, and large advertisements on wooden billboards. One of them caught the doctor’s eye twice. It bore the inscription: “Moreau & Vetchinkin. Mechanical seeders. Threshing machines.” “That was a good firm. Their agricultural machinery was first-rate.”

  The advertising I found were signs from the imagined future, from “normal life,” that sunny Western garden. My villagers were familiar with the concept. Many of them had visited Finland or Sweden, and knew that Soviet Estonia was “not normal,” a state they hoped would be temporary as Estonia moved from the Soviet sphere to its rightful place in the northern European one. Most of the aid went to western and central Estonia. There was soon a style fault line between western and eastern Estonia—the east, where most of the Russians lived, remained Soviet in style, whilst the west and the centre quickly became Westernised.

  After the first few weeks in the village, I slowly began to feel at home. I was also, in some sense, coming home to a culture and a landscape familiar from childhood. Virtually everybody in the village wore clothes donated from Sweden. I had grown up amongst those jeans and T-shirts and jackets and boots; they were part of my memories. I had left Sweden thirteen years before I came to the collective farm, and the donated clothes seemed to belong to my teenage years. I saw a woman in Sami boots—in 1970s Sweden those boots signalled prog music, vegetarianism, ecology, and anti-imperialism; here, depoliticised, they still spoke to me, in the mildly surreal and secret language of things. The fact that those clothes were old and second-hand masked their newness to me, but the villagers, too, wore them with nonchalance. For them there was no contradiction between the concepts of new and normal. As in Russia, “normal” meant good, or okay, but it was also the ubiquitous expression for what Estonia—one’s life, one’s flat, one’s work—ought to become, rather than what it was. Estonia was still “not normal.”

  The peninsula was big—some thirty by fifty kilometers. About a third of the land was forest: the old forests and, nearer to the village, the newer plantations. The new trees—conifers—were tall and thin, swaying like high grass in
the wind, jostling for the light at the top. There were straight wide lanes for enormous machinery, muddy wheel tracks sinking down two or three feet, and gigantic drainage ditches. To cross them you had to climb down, walk across, then climb up again. As industrial concerns, the new forests were as badly run as most other Soviet industries, whilst the old forest was as decayed and mysterious as the old buildings and forgotten spaces of Soviet cities. It felt abandoned and wild, criss-crossed by forgotten roads leading to abandoned farmhouses, orchards merging with forest, nature taking over.

  I soon felt deeply at home in that landscape. I knew that northern Baltic terrain so well, and this was a deeper, vaster, and sadder version of what I had known in Sweden. It was as if I had grown up in Plato’s cave, and was now, for the first time, seeing real wilderness. In reality, of course, it was a wilderness of neglect and abandonment, haphazardly re-wilded, not truly wild. I walked for hours, tasting the plants as I walked. In the spring there was wild sorrel—a lost taste since I left Sweden—and later cranberries, bilberries, crowberries, and blackberries.

  On the fringes of the forest in August children were playing in clouds of languid late-season mosquitoes. It was very quiet. Occasionally you might hear the roar of a motorised saw, rusty sawing wheels set into old tables. Away from the villages the wilderness crept in, but even there the evidence of war and depopulation was every­where. I found abandoned farmhouses deep in the forest—mossy thatched roofs caved in, windows partly boarded up, grey animal shades melting into the dusky background. There were wells with rusty buckets, empty tin mugs left on the ground, old orchards now merging with the forest, broken carts, upside-down tin baths half covered with nettles. Beyond, the deep forest was easy to get lost in, dense and green in summer. In the autumn, the human landscape became more evident. Like the ruined teeth in the mouths of older people, the abandoned houses were political signs in that haunted landscape.

  Inside the abandoned farmhouses there might be a narrow iron bedstead in the corner of a room, a small table and a stool or chair. The roofs were leaking; old mattresses left behind chewed to pieces. Once I found an old suit and a coat on a bed, grey, poor, and worn out. There was the envelope of a letter, dated 1966. On the floor was an empty can of Russian fly killer. I cautiously walked into the next room, where the rain was dripping steadily through the roof. The kitchen, dark and poor, had a stove, a small table, and a cupboard. It’s possible that the former occupants had died, but they might have moved into a flat in the new blocks, or moved away altogether, for whatever reason.

  No one ever commented on those abandoned houses. People took it for granted that houses might eventually be abandoned, and that they then naturally decayed, joining the order of nature. In England, where I live now, everything is owned; there is a potential market for every building in the land, and enclosure, beyond the enclaves of national reserves and a few parks and commons, is permanent. That was not the case in the Soviet Union. Within a Western liberal democracy, the signs of war and depopulation would have been gone within a decade; here, as in the old East Berlin, facades scarred by machine guns, they lingered. There was a great poignancy in that. I felt, also, a great sense of freedom walking in those unfenced tracts of land, the freedom of rambling that I had grown up with in Sweden.

  The land had not been so accessible during the Soviet occupation. Soon after the war the Soviet authorities ploughed an intermittent deep line in the sandy soil fifty meters from the sea, beyond which people were no longer allowed to go: the entire peninsula, along with most of the Estonian coast, had become classified as a “border protection zone.” You needed permission to enter, and identity papers were checked at the barrier. The coastline was dotted with watchtowers, swept by strong searchlights, and the beaches were regularly patrolled.

  The authorities tore up a lot of the old juniper and heather, and replaced them with conifer plantations. The inefficiency of the system, in this respect, was a blessing: much of the old forest was left untouched. Even so, many patches of heather and juniper were destroyed. People had watched helplessly as the landscape was transformed before their eyes. I had vivid dreams about this, drenched in that helplessness. I dreamt, also, about soldiers, fear, violence, and hiding, but the dreams about the destruction of the landscape felt more real, I suppose because I had felt that same emotion when I was young, seen the same landscape in Sweden scarred by development.

  Protecting the landscape was part of the national conversation in the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden. There was still much common land, treated quite cavalierly by councils everywhere. My father, ever a libertarian, took us children on a secret mission one night, to tear up the awful conifers planted by the council in tidy rows to make some small profit from the previously wild and sandy heather and juniper slope near our weekend house. I was protective of all life as a child, and a little concerned even for those invading conifers as I carefully lifted them from the ground, my father storming ahead. But I was, also, genuinely saddened by the death of that lovely patch of moorland. Once it was gone, there was nothing left to protect, and the council eventually sold the land for housing development, as perhaps it had planned to all along.

  The Red Army headquarters were on the grounds of the old Paslepa manor house on the peninsula, which had been demolished after the war. At the time of my fieldwork the flimsy postwar barracks had recently been abandoned, and an Estonian flag had replaced the Soviet one. Under the flagpole was a low white wall where you could still see the faint blue outline of a Soviet map, with a Soviet slogan, in red, underneath: THE BORDERS OF OUR MOTHER-LAND ARE HOLY. A strangely religious slogan, but there it was, Cyrillic letters fading.

  There was an archaeology of signs in the landscape, marking the fields and forests, and the small, neat vegetable gardens around the farmhouses. Those gardens were the private plots, well tended and still productive, that each collective farmer was allowed to keep and cultivate. The collective farm fields on the peninsula, by contrast, were too large for the sandy soil, corroded by dusty winds, whilst the giant collective farm machinery, dying icons of Soviet modernity, rusted behind the workshops.

  The ploughed line in the sand near the sea was still discernible in places. The watchtowers still stood, stripped and weathered, not yet historical landmarks, but no longer structures of authority. They all had that indeterminate Soviet look, between incompletion and dilapidation: white brick badly put together, concrete poured on the ground to form haphazard paths, woodwork rotting on the platforms, signs in Russian rusting on the floors, long since stripped of wire and anything else of value.

  In September, school started. On the first day there were two separate opening ceremonies, one for the younger village children and one for the high school students. The little children marched in to piano music from the Swedish films of Pippi Longstocking. Estonia had allied itself to an international European culture in order to escape the Soviet images of Estonian nationhood: women with corn-blond hair in colourful folk costumes. The music from Pippi Longstocking—instantly recognisable to all Swedes—was yet another way of building Swedishness.

  The high school students were different, many of them boarders from other areas. In the evening there was a ceremonial initiation of the new students by the older ones, who were dressed up, or dressed down, in dressing gowns and rags. There was something chilling about the ceremony, which took place in the cold and echoing gym. Some of the pupils were bumped down the stairs, blindfolded, in old shopping trolleys. They were made to sit in buckets of cold water. One boy was subjected to a mock execution, a noose placed around his neck. What it symbolised was unclear, but it was hard not to associate it with the history of Soviet repression. I watched it with Katarina, the new teacher sent out by the Swedish Council, the daughter of a sea captain. She was a beautiful and somewhat ravaged woman in her fifties, with hooded blue eyes.

  “Mmm,” she said with an indefinable expression. “Well.”

 
She was, generally, an advocate of the common Swedish notion that the troubles of the world could be avoided if only people could be made to see the error of their ways, and become more rational and instrumentalist, more Swedish, in fact, in their political culture. Like me—actually more than me—she cleaned incessantly. But she had unexpected qualities. She tamed a resident mouse by feeding it, and named it Dumble. I knew I was not capable of such a leap into the wild, but I liked it in her.

  After the ceremony we went, for the first time, for a drink at the basement bar, Gorbyland. It was small and cosy, selling Western chocolates, ice cream, cigarettes, and packets of coffee as well as Russian and Estonian vodka, sangria, Soviet liqueurs, and beer. Smoking was banned, because of the asthmatic tendencies of Werner, the owner, so there was always a steady stream of smokers going in and out, meeting on the damp concrete steps outside. That night there were about ten men and three boys there, silently watching a Russian videotape of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, cheaply and probably illegally dubbed by one bored voice making only the slightest pretence of drama.

  To deepen my relationship with the community, I had decided to move out from the “hotel.” I had found, through the school, a room with a family. The mother, Inna, was a janitor at the school. Toivo, her husband, was a stonecutter by trade, and was now unemployed, with damaged lungs. They had two children, Ene, a quiet girl of thirteen, and Erki, who was a tough guy of fifteen. That evening, Katarina and I walked past Toivo, who stood, drunk and glassy-eyed, by himself. As we sat down by the bar he came in and stood behind me, and got another drink. I asked if he wanted to sit, and he grabbed my arm quite hard saying no, and whispered, ominously, that he would see me tomorrow. Katarina looked at me with some concern, whilst the rest of the people in the bar studiously ignored us. The Ninja Turtles ran around on the screen, the monotonous Russian voice droning on.