Everything is Wonderful Page 6

  The next day Toivo turned up at midday, drunk and maudlin, strong but unsteady, and said in broken English, “My wife said, my son said, my daughter said, ‘No drink,’ and now I drink, I drink one, two, three, four drink. Sigrid! I am sorry. I drink. I don’t know. Every day I say, ‘Tomorrow, no drink.’ Every day, drink.” I smiled briskly, secretly wary—he was a big man, with a dark beard, and he was not sober. Together we carried my few belongings into the car and drove the short distance across the square to his flat in one of the older blocks opposite the school. Inna, his wife—dark, round, and small—was visibly angry with him, and so was Kulla, their friend and an English teacher at the school. She was an energetic blonde in her forties who, despite her profession, spoke little or no English. She had turned up at the flat a few minutes after I arrived to help to welcome me. I had been given Toivo and Inna’s bedroom, and they now slept behind a screen in the living room.

  I slowly unpacked, surveying the bed—narrower than any bed I had ever seen, and drowning now in the king-sized duvet and expensive pillows I had bought at NK, the Harrods of Stockholm. One, I remember, was stuffed with lambswool. My friend Johanna had laughed helplessly at my lambswool pillow, and so had I. That pillow, lying there on the narrow bed, seemed to hold the memory of that careless laughter, that easy stepping in and out of expensive shops.

  I had been given the ninth grade, the last class of local ele­mentary school, and one class of high school students to teach. I liked teaching, especially the older students, who were interested, and wanted to learn. For the younger ones I used the Soviet school books. They were full of propaganda, which the children tittered about, putting on voices as I had them read passages out loud in class:

  The Soviet Union is a very big country. The people of the Soviet Union want to live and work in peace. They want to live in peace with all the other peoples of the world.

  The birthday of the Soviet Union is on the seventh of November. It is a holiday for everybody. The workers do not go to work and the pupils do not go to school. In the morning everybody wants to go to the demonstration. In the afternoon a lot of people have parties. They dance and sing. Some people want to have a rest at home. They usually watch TV or read books. Some people go for long walks with their friends and families. Everybody has a good time. Everybody is happy and cheerful on that day.

  Long live peace!

  Long live Soviet Estonia!

  Long live the Soviet Union!

  Long live Red October Day!

  I pointed at the next girl to read more:

  Exercise 1: Translate

  1. Skilled workers are needed everywhere.

  2. Educated people are needed to develop our socialist culture.

  3. Every year all-republican contests are held in mathematics.

  4. Prizes are given to the winners of contests.

  5. Mathematics is taught at school.

  6. Estonian is spoken in the Estonian SSR.

  7. Russian is spoken all over the Soviet Union.

  8. In the Soviet Union the young people are given every opportunity for many-sided development.

  They giggled even more at that, glancing at each other and at me. It was hard to believe that this was only two years after it ended.

  I was now immersing myself in Estonian. I had endured many hours of Estonian language training with a young Estonian teacher at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. I was her only pupil, but the school prided itself on the many languages it offered. She never, I think, really understood my project—after several lessons it emerged that she thought that my prospective “field work” meant that I was going to assist the collective farmers in their farm work, probably for an agricultural study. She smiled at me with slightly empty blue eyes, and proceeded to drill the language into me, until I nearly cried with frustration. Estonian, along with Finnish and Hungarian, is notoriously difficult to learn. It’s not a tonal language, and not part of the Indo-European family. Its grammar is so complex that one feels it could only have been invented in the north, tribal elders and their assistants honing the complexity of the language through the dark nights of winter.

  We had no books, and my teacher would bring me sheets of vocabulary. The first lesson I looked at the photocopy in front of me and started laughing slightly hysterically because I recognised not a single word on the sheet. I had studied many European languages—English, of course, but also French, German, and Italian—but I had never before learnt a language that was not Indo-European. Learning Estonian made me feel that I had only ever really studied dialects of the same language before, Latin and Germanic roots casually intertwined. This was like learning random strings of code by heart, with whimsical comic interludes of phonetic loan words like peekon for “bacon.” The older Swedish or German loanwords often had the initial s or st dropped off. Thus strand (“beach”), becomes rand; stund (“a while,” or “an hour”), tund; storm, torm; and so on, creating an oddly childlike atmosphere within the complexity.

  All the flats in the village were strikingly alike, differing only in degrees of modernity. Toivo and Inna’s block had been built in the 1960s, halfway between the ones built in the 1950s— wood stoves and wooden staircases—and the later ones, which were of a better material standard. It had running water, but the lavatory was a waterless, sinister hole. The interiors, however, were the same in all the flats—a living room with a sofa and some chairs, a wall unit with a television, books, dried flowers, and glass animals. In the bathrooms and kitchens, empty Western bottles and packages, presents from visitors, were displayed as decorations. In Toivo and Inna’s flat, empty bottles of Charm fabric conditioner, “Simply Satin,” and Russian eau de cologne, as well as Swedish and Finnish shampoo, and an empty Colgate tube, were arranged on the bathroom shelf. During my survey of the community, I came across only one unusual decoration: a collection of beer cans, arranged in a pyramid. I thought it was unique, until, a few days later, I saw a similar collection, identically arranged. The idea of expressing individualism through materialism, and the idea of competing via material goods—two fundamental ideas of Western societies—were pretty absent on the collective farm. When the villagers displayed empty Western shampoo bottles, they did so in the knowledge that Western bottles had become accepted forms of decoration, not in order to compete with their neighbours. Those bottles were signs that the whole village had a connection with the West, a way of expressing the new normal.

  Toivo and Inna’s books were quality stuff, and this was not unusual either. There, in Soviet hardback editions, was Balzac’s Père Goirot, John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Erich Remarque’s Arc de Triomphe, and Jack London’s Martin Eden; Bernard Shaw, Emile Zola, John Gardner, Gerald Durrell, Guy de Maupassant, and Franz Kafka. They also had Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Alexander von Bülow’s Passion; Ian Fleming, the Norwegian author Trygve Gulbranssen, and Alberto Moravia (who was published in the Soviet Union); a Pat Conroy thriller; a Swedish-Estonian dictionary; a book on astrology and a dream interpretation book. Toivo and Inna didn’t read books, or newspapers, or anything other than, occasionally, the dictionary, to help me in my halting Estonian conversations. I don’t think I ever really understood the point of that personal library, but I think it had to do with Soviet notions of high culture, of the ceaseless Soviet struggle to combat “rural idiocy,” and, also, with censorship and the normativity of cultural life. Lolita was banned in the Soviet Union until 1989, so that must have been new. Ian Fleming, I assume, was new. The older books, the Soviet classics, came with the ­territory—cheap, ubiquitous, and unread. The best that could be said for them was that if one day a bookish child would be born into one of the village families, those hardback editions of the classics would be ready and waiting.

  It was a surprise to me to find that the villagers were so lacking in materialism and materi
alist aspirations. They really did live in a more immediate and experiential world. The scene, as it were, was already set. The props were simple and accepted as such, the quality of the play not judged by the simplicity of the stage set. Now, however, that expensive Western goods were arriving in dribs and drabs, the material life of the collective farm was beginning to look and feel poor and tawdry in comparison. The empty bottles on the bathroom shelves in the village, and on shelves across western Estonia, were originally modest gifts from Swedish visitors. They couldn’t have predicted that the utilitarian soap and shampoo they brought would have the effect of making the Soviet-quality shampoo seem forever not good enough. They couldn’t have foreseen that their presents of Swedish coffee would make Estonian coffee taste thin and bitter, or that their very presence on the collective farm would make the villagers feel poor and provincial in comparison.

  The logic of the gift, in anthropological terms, is that the giver is enriched, whilst the recipient is placed in a position of obligation, of social debt. The Swedes, coming from a deeply egalitarian culture, followed this logic by often appearing dimly ashamed of their gifts and of seeming too rich, and yet they felt they should bring something. It was complicated. Sometimes people avoided the issue by giving me the gifts instead of the villagers. Other times I was given things because the visitors thought I was a villager. I got a hat, chewing gum, coffee, and vitamins. I declined a computer. I remember opening a bottle of vitamin C someone hastily thrust into my hand. The dusty sour smell of it made my mouth water, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to explain the mistake and return it, though I think—I hope—I did pass it on.

  One day in September a Swedish family arrived in a red Volvo loaded with IBM computers. They had persuaded IBM Sweden to donate eight older models to the community. Four were supposed to go to the school and four to the municipal authorities. I went with them to the mayor’s office to see one of them set up, a gleaming white computer on the land surveyor’s old desk, next to an untidy heap of ancient-looking documents. Actually the documents, lists of farms being reclaimed by former refugees, were more recent than the computers, which in Sweden were already deemed to be obsolete.

  The family came from one of the villages, and had applied to get their old house back. I turned the conversation to the house claims and the list of farms. The woman, who was the applicant, knew most of the names on the list. Recently they’d had a meeting in Sweden, with more than four hundred people there. The Estonian Swedish organisation Svenska Odlingens Vänner (Friends of Swedish Culture), which was enjoying a post-Soviet revival, had informed the audience when to apply and how. She took a long time answering my question about whether they will get the house back, and seemed uncertain about who lived there now: a Russian man, she said, and a woman, “some kind of half Russian.”

  The land surveyor tinkered helplessly with the computer, and finally said he would get somebody from the already computerised land office in Haapsalu to come and help . I wondered what would happen to the computers. The Swedes were concerned that they shouldn’t get into the wrong hands, and then offered one of them to me, which, though obviously the wrong hands, was not surprising. Much later, the computers were indeed lost, though how I don’t know.

  Earlier a group of Swedish Finns from Kronoby, the Finnish twin town, had come for a visit. One of them gave me a woolly hat as a present. In the evening they came for an event at the culture house with some locals, including Alar, the other English teacher, who, unlike Kulla, could actually speak English. Virve, the Swedish teacher from Finland, looked on in silence. She was Finnish, but spoke Swedish fluently, a serious and cultured person, probably then in her late fifties. She didn’t think much of my project, I think, but eventually warmed to me enough to voice her complaints about the mismanagement of the Swedish revival. Inna, the school secretary, was behind the bar, selling vodka, beer, and liqueurs, cake and black smoked flatfish. Werner from Gorbyland, playing a synthesiser, started the singing and dancing. A small elderly Finnish man came up to me and asked me to dance, alarmingly flirtatious. “Do you go on holiday ever?” he asked. “To the Canaries?” He held me tight, and I was overwhelmed with waves of slightly hysterical laughter. The Finnish women danced together, the Estonians danced in tight and old-fashioned couples. No one mixed much. I drank a glass of Vana Tallinn, Estonian sweet and smoky brandy, and felt cold and nauseated later. The Finns left, expressing concern for me, who would have to stay behind in the village after they had gone. I thought of the many times in my life when I had been the one to leave, visiting aid projects, feeling concern for those who stayed behind. Now it was me trudging back to my cold room, going to sleep and waking up in the same reality. And it wasn’t too bad.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, given the impoverishment that the new system had brought, the majority of the people on the collective farm thought the old system was better than the new one. Ironically, in the beginning of my fieldwork, the caution bred by Soviet repression meant that this preference was communicated to me in code rather than in open conversation. Being openly discontented would have demonstrated opposition to the authorities, still thought to be more powerful than perhaps they actually were. I soon understood that people generally assumed that my fieldwork involved an element of spying on behalf of the village authorities, not least since I was obviously not particularly interested in what they thought I should be interested in—the ethnography of pre-war Estonian Swedish life—and overly interested in Soviet and post-Soviet matters that were still of political relevance. Even though dissidence and political repression were a thing of the past, Soviet habits of thought were taking some time to wash out of the system.

  Thus in the beginning of my fieldwork, people talked cautiously about the lack of “work” and “bread” (always leib, or “dark bread,” as opposed to sai, “white bread”)—evocative terms, embedded in the old slogan “Work and bread for the people!” Unemployment was high. Women moved into the category of “housewife,” but men without work were invariably töötu, “unemployed,” said with a shrug, gazing at the floor, or defiantly, with a stare: This is what your great system has brought us. Gradually, stories of corruption and opportunism emerged, stories that may never be properly investigated. There were no proper channels for complaints or whistle-blowing yet, and protests would probably lead nowhere.

  I was later told that one of my informants had been accused of having collaborated with the KGB. I remembered being surprised at seeing quite so much of this particular person in the official photographs from the kolkhoz time. I remembered him one summer day in his little Škoda, stopping the car in a cloud of dust, beckoning me over to give me some strawberries. His wife was drinking beer from a bottle next to him, there was a gaggle of kids in the back; the day was hot, dusty, almost hallucinatory. It was easy, in the repressed atmosphere of the collective farm, where so much still was not said, to imagine scenes of collaboration. It may have been true, I don’t know.

  By mid-September I was fully settled in with Toivo and Inna. Their little Scottish terrier had taken to me in a big way—I was the first person in his life to take him for walks, and he appreciated that enormously. I was covered in fleabites as a result. On 22 September my diary records that there was some tepid water in the morning. This was rare: the water had been cold since I arrived. I took a brief and trickling shower, and Inna washed clothes in the tub.

  Toivo continued to drink, and was sentimental and maudlin when drunk. “I have a brother, and now I have a sister, Sigrid, you,” he said. “I look at you, a beautiful woman, and I understand you.” Inna looked worried, and, I have to say, so was I. On this occasion, and on many others to come, I distracted them by making them laugh. That wasn’t hard—there was so much I didn’t know, and so much I didn’t understand, and all of that was potentially funny. There is no dignity in fieldwork, only constant engagement.

  One evening Toivo rang his friend Ets, a builder and sailor, and fathe
r of one of my pupils. Toivo was, intermittently, working for him. Ets was not local; he had moved to the peninsula from Kohtla-Järve, because, he said, of the tension there between the Estonians and the Russians. That evening he came to be introduced to me, bringing a bottle of strawberry liqueur. I sipped it cautiously, and we talked.

  “How old are you, may I ask?” he asked politely. I said thirty-one. “And not married?” His intense blue eyes were studying me, a small man with some sort of authority. I was suddenly so happy that my breath was catching, the delirious happiness of feeling that the fieldwork was going to be possible after all. It was possible to break through the silence, and have comprehensible conversations. And, of course, the tipsy sweet happiness of strawberry liqueur.

  FIVE

  The Mercy of God

  One day I met an old woman who was carrying a small, pale child on the back of an old bicycle. She knew who I was—I think by then everyone did, though most people still ignored me. She, instead, addressed me in broken Swedish: “The mercy of God is great.” She looked at me expectantly and patiently with intelligent blue eyes.

  “Are you Swedish?” I asked in Estonian, but she shook her head. She was Estonian and a Seventh-day Adventist. That day, standing outside the shop, she talked to me in a mixture of four languages about her life. The child, purple shadows under her eyes, sat waiting quietly.