Everything is Wonderful Page 7

  Later Ruth came to visit me again, and I got to know her better. She was seventy-six, and had been married twice. She had had six children, and was originally from Haapsalu. She told me in broken German about the hard and punitive work on the collective farm after the war. Nobody was paid then, and women had to carry the heavy milk containers. One Christmas Eve she and some other women known to be religious were forced to clean out the pigsties. The authorities burnt all the Bibles they could find outside the church that year, she said. I was still living in the “hotel” then, and there was an eerie moment when Timo came in. She looked at me with obvious fear, and started to shuffle the papers she had brought with her. After that she whispered. Timo, wholly indifferent to Soviet matters, couldn’t have cared less, but I could see that he might have randomly resembled a Soviet apparatchik from that time, so smooth and blond, something inscrutable about him.

  A few days later I visited Ruth at her cottage. She waited for me outside. We stood in her tiny vegetable garden, the grey geese collecting in the field across the meadow, hundreds of them gathering under the high sky before flying south. As we stood there, she talked, again, about her past, a life of oppression and poverty. Her husband was the deputy chairman of the collective farm, and a violent and abusive alcoholic. Despite his privileged position, she worked in the dairy, backbreaking labour because of the heavy canisters, in the reek of souring milk.

  One day in 1952 she fainted at work, and woke up to hallucinations, including a vision of Stalin, dead, lying in his grave. She saw the school in the village in flames, a vision that would also soon be fulfilled—the old school was, indeed, later consumed by fire. She saw, too, all the many records of surveillance, interviews with informers and interrogations incriminating local people, sucked up in a whirlwind above the manor house, then the communist headquarters—a vision that did not come true. Where was she, then, I wondered, on that fine line between religion, dissidence, and mental illness? She must, at least, have felt free, the freedom that madness brings in totalitarianism, because when her co-workers gathered around her, she told them what she saw. She was also, suddenly, paralysed.

  She was hospitalised in a clinic in town. One morning her husband came in drunk. He shouted at her, and at everyone else within hearing distance, that she was “anti-communist,” and staggered up to her and hit her. “Contra kommunismus—Ich könnte das nicht ­verstehen—das vare ju guilliotin [Against communism—I couldn’t understand it—that was the guillotine],” she whispered in her broken German, and drew her hand across her throat. But he himself was on another borderline, between the violent world of the paranoid alcoholic and the relative security and power of his position. The authorities probably wanted to get rid of him—in his own way I imagine he was as much of a liability as Ruth. Whatever discussions may have taken place in the background, after the episode at the clinic, he was sent to a centre for alcoholics in Tallinn.

  Eventually they both came home. The paralysis subsided, and Ruth was working again, subdued and resigned. The treatment hadn’t cured her husband’s drinking, and life was as hard as before. One day, in the vegetable garden, he lost his temper, and raised his arm to hit her, when out of nowhere a KGB man stepped in, and took him away. She was, of course, reluctant to see a KGB man as an angelic messenger, but nevertheless she felt a sense of divine intervention about the way he appeared at that particular moment. They were under surveillance, presumably, and it was probably as good a time as any to arrest him. Later she was arrested, too, and sent to a “reeducation” camp in southern Estonia. She escaped from there, and, helped by her daughter, came back to the peninsula, at first clandestinely. Within months she was arrested again, interrogated, beaten, and sent back to the camp. After Stalin’s death in 1953 she was rehabilitated. She came back to the house, and continued to work in the dairy.

  Her husband, who by then had come back, died from alcoholism not long afterwards. She eventually married again, but this time it was a calling—God asked her to marry a man who was disabled, and she did. She was, when I knew her, deeply, perhaps even madly, religious. She was also unusually intelligent, sensitive, and creative. The pressure of Stalinism, and in fact the virtual embodiment of Stalinism in the coarse and violent form of her husband, and the grim suffering she endured, flipped her, I think, over the edge, and she never quite recovered.

  We had slowly approached her house from the meadow where she had directed me to put the car. She walked backwards, looking at me intently, into the garden, which was fenced with uneven poles of wood to keep the elk and the wild boar out. “Die sind böse tieren,” she said about the boars, “evil animals.” We stood on the uneven steps of the cottage for at least half an hour, by two old tin baths collecting rainwater. Finally she lifted the rusty chain from its hook and we went in.

  It was like entering a cave. I carefully stepped into the hall, and she closed the door, lined on the inside with dirty rags. The walls, too, were lined with bundles of wood and torn rags. From this surreal and narrow passage we entered the kitchen, through a low doorway. The kitchen was a bare room, with an old wood-fired range and a bench. The floor was covered with bits of wood and scraps of fabric. There was an electrical radiator with slices of bread drying on it, and a tin bucket with more bread on the floor. There was no other food, though she did grow apples, potatoes, cabbage, and beetroot in her garden. She slowly escorted me through the kitchen, to her bedroom beyond.

  Here, she had an iron bed, a table, and a chair. There were many religious books on the table, all of them open, some carefully mended, and some annotated in her handwriting. There were juniper branches everywhere. This stopped the mice and rats from eating the books, she said, and showed me how they had eaten away some of the paper. Those dismal bite marks explained the odd shapes of the pages of the book she had given me earlier—she must have trimmed the pages nibbled by vermin. I sat on the chair and she sat on the bed, talking about God. I had given her a packet of Swedish biscuits, which she held in her hand during the entire visit, incongruous clear yellow in this environment where everything merged into a dark blue brown. The windows were almost boarded up, torn pieces of lace and rags stuck on the boards. In the end she called me “Liebe Sigrid,” and blessed me.

  Now, so many years later, I feel the limitation of words: “apples,” “beetroot,” and “cabbage,” the produce of her garden, are such pleasant words, organic and wholesome. How do you convey the poverty? Not only hers, but the poverty of most of the old people I met: old European peasant poverty. The smell of stale sweat, earth, and apples. How can I describe her obvious trauma, the marks that the Stalinist repression had left on her? Her tears, and the tears of other old people, when they talked about the arrests, the forced collectivisation and the deportations. Veevi usually got angry with me as she remembered, and I responded as best I could. “‘Really?’ you say—yes, really, that is how we lived!” she would say, glaring at me. Ruth and the other old people on the collective farm were never angry. Their subterranean memories of those desperate times of long ago were painful, and they often cried, but they were too patient, and too submissive, for anger.

  Ruth was also, of course, an eccentric within the community on the peninsula. In Estonian Seventh-day Adventist circles, however, she was quite well known, and had been mentioned in a book, which she modestly showed me. She had also written a tract herself, Leib Taevast (“[Dark] Bread from Heaven”), published in 1988. She had, also, created a little museum on the first floor of her house, dedicated to the Swedish missionary Ölvingsson, who had lived there. The first floor had been left almost as it was when he escaped from Estonia with his wife during the war, their few belongings arranged and regularly dusted. She only showed me that the following summer—it was an act of trust, and it took her a long time to trust me.

  About a week after I first met her, I visited Ruth again. I remember sitting on her bed, a pile of small worm-eaten apples by my feet, an old-fashio
ned alarm clock ticking on the table. Part of the wall was covered by wallpaper, and there was a picture of a snowy mountain landscape from an English almanac from 1977. Old books, again, were open everywhere, almost like decorations. Torn old clothes were hanging in a corner. At a certain point she started to sing from the kitchen, in a high beautiful voice, an Estonian hymn. She was cooking for me, peeling potatoes, whilst singing the unexpectedly beautiful song. When it was all done—boiled potatoes, burnt black cabbage, and sour cream on a tin plate, cabbage soup with potatoes and carrots in a tin bowl, and stewed apples—she covered my legs with a white cloth and watched me eat, her blue eyes shining.

  She told me then about reading Billy Graham years ago, at Christmas, by candlelight. The electricity had been cut off, and no one knew she was there. I felt the poignant distinction between her poverty and her suffering, and the commercial and sanitised blandness of the American evangelists. I took notes as she spoke. “Nicht schreiben Eesti keeles [Don’t write in Estonian],” she said in a mix of German and Estonian, worried that I would be indiscreet. Estonian was a lasso that would catch her, and a noose, she told me. They always had to write by hand, she said, because the KGB was always looking for typewriters. She looked at me, head to one side, concentrating, and said, in English: “But God gave me wings and made my enemies blind.” There was a rustling noise in a corner, a rat or a mouse. God gave her wings. Her mission in life had given her such a profound sense of meaning and purpose. It was her sanity and her insanity.

  I left her eventually, and walked into the forest. I glimpsed a fox, and soon I was lost, deep in that familiar Baltic forest, my home. I wandered around for several hours, until I found a road. Eventually someone in a car stopped to give me a lift home. We drove in silence, and I got off on the square nodding my thanks.

  Soon afterwards Ruth gave me a handwritten notebook, her “Life Story,” and then another one, to help my study. She entitled it “The History of Nuckö,” the Swedish name for Noarootsi, the peninsula. These were extraordinary documents, laboriously translated from Estonian into English, which she didn’t speak well. The translation, and her slightly feverish state of mind, made them unintentionally beautiful, even poetic. “Life Story” was mainly a religious tract, mixed with local history. She never wrote down what she told me about her own life, unfortunately. “The History of Nuckö” was a description of the peninsula as it had been before the Soviet invasion. Within the madness, and the crazy translation, was reality; and the madness, and the translation, was also a reflection of the reality and the history that she endured. Her eccentricity—I don’t think it was more than that, in the beginning—was precipitated through historical circumstances into mental illness, her difference a part of the twentieth-century story of this peninsula, this collective farm, and the Soviet regime. Ruth is dead now—she died a few years after I left Estonia.

  Extracts from Ruth Kanarbik’s “Life Story,” Pürksi,

  October 18, 1993

  I begin to write over Pasklep. Devilish age, sad age. School-children also spies, sky was as night, earth as giddiness, deceit, fraud—life as leprosy. Communist live royally. Work women (people) must live as deaf and dumb. Wherever seen wrong, evil, crime underfed always naked (footwear old, rubbers broken) cold habit, children only home.

  Kommunist was visitor, holiday maker. Kommunism was criminal offender, delinquent, felon, stupid reign. Very, very great baseness, cruelty, arrogance! Yes it is stupidity! Kommunism (is sinister) is learned to murder (murderer).

  Alcohol is youth’s glutton and snake. God give happiness and lucky and blessing, but alcohol is a great misfortune, mishap . . . alcohol is a bullet, a gunpowder to the people, the youth.

  University pitch-dark, to mock wise, sage, intelligent people.

  I wish to witness, to speak what God did to Nuckö (Noarootsi). Historie speak a sea was over Nuckö, then a little island, a small islet. Then sea go silently away, earth came, to come in sight.

  God present to Nuckö one richness. This is: sea mud (mire, slime) medicine to cure. Near Nuckö is town Haapsalu, this is a little kuurort—summer-resort. Histoire speak: Nuckö beautiful Ramsholm was full visitor—to spend the summer. Nuckö near Wormsi have in sea many, many, many ton sea mud. (+ raadium)

  This seamud to bring to sanatorim and there is people coming to cure (to treat). This liquid, fluid seamud is cure with water in bath, and in baths. Salty sea mud baths. Must money to give and illness go better.

  Nuckö is rich apple-trees and apples. Also wickerwork, wicker chair. And many, many plum-trees. Sortiment: “Noarootsi red plum.” This name is good sortiment over Estonia.

  In Nuckö is God very beautiful woods to present. Many, many linden trees (lime trees) For example: ­medicine-trees: pine trees, great pine woods. Pine-cones! Chestnut trees!

  Very good potatoes earth. Nuckö in Estonian age to bring—to carry, to transport potatoes to Sweden, and red plums and rye (cornflower blew). Every farmer transport this material to Sweden.

  Many farmer was fisher. Fishmarket was in Haapsalu town. Fishing season was fishy.

  Motorboat little (ship) bring people in Österby harbour every day three time in town Haapsalu. There in Österby is stone warf, pier. A long iron-stone bridge.

  In Nuckö is a beautiful flora. Interesting! Vegetation, is very medicine plant.

  Plentiful berry earth, many storms. Stormy days. Redberry in wood (no strawberry). Bilberry, blueberry. Very medicine. Whortleberry. Very good jem (dzemm) with apples. Very delicate. This all is God Present. Say God price! Honour!

  Also give good Sky Father in Nuckö the people and children red winter berry in swampy, in marshy, boggi. This winterberry is cranberry . . . here is red baburitsky berry. This berry wish cold water over to power and sinking over. Oo that is very tasteful, delicious, palatable! Oo how pleasant soür, acid. That is medical berry.

  In Nuckö is very good flower-base (platform) the bee-keeping. Many kilograms honey and bee life is good, very little illness. I was (have) also years bee-keeping.

  In Nuckö is also wolf, they came, when communism came to Estonia. All unfit, unfitness, immoral, improper came in Nuckö with atheism and red-armee military. And military state of war. That was terrible! Our home was near sea, near Wormsi bay. There was three kilometer frontier guard. Border-land-territory. No one step can people no go.

  Mysterious reign, secret, to dissimulate, clandestine.

  So to mask GPU. He as jackal to carry women (men) despair, despondency, desperate.

  There are hints here of a thriving rural pre-war economy. The war, and the Soviet system, ended it all. The ferry, which left for Haapsalu three times a day from the harbour, was long since gone. The trade in wickerwork and apples, potatoes, plums, honey, and rye was all gone. Private fishing was banned after the Soviet takeover, and the fish market in Haapsalu closed down. The spa and the tourists were gone.

  The vibrant rural civil society of the 1930s was also gone: the agricultural mutual benefit societies and cooperatives, choirs and sport clubs, sobriety meetings and libraries, Swedish minority schools and journals, and, of course, independent farming. By 1993 the sea was too dirty to fish, and the huge, useless collective farm fields, brushed by dusty winds, were lying fallow, waiting to be claimed by former owners, the former refugees. Old people fitfully remembered that lost world, that particular social economy. Young people didn’t know much, if anything, about it.

  SIX

  History

  Before my fieldwork I had visited the Estonian Swedish group Svenska Odlingens Vänner in Stockholm, located in a basement flat in a respectable residential area. It was run by two émigrés, a woman from Noarootsi and a man from Ormsö, or Vormsi in Estonian. The society had eked out an émigré cultural existence since the war, but now, with the revival of the Estonian Swedish culture, they were busy, advising on property claims, organising events, and talking to jou
rnalists. But the aesthetic of that basement—salmon-coloured walls, glass cabinet with mannequins in folk costumes bleached blond hair and curled eyelashes thick with mascara—was of the 1970s, when no one wanted to know about the Estonian Swedes.

  The man, I remember, told me a story about seeing a Swedish ethnographic film about Ormsö in Sweden, shortly after his arrival. He noticed, and the audience, he assumed, did too, that the legs of one of the women in the film were dirty, and he felt such shame about the dirt and the poverty, and the strange folk costumes. I felt for him. But soon after the war nobody was watching those old films anymore anyway. The culture of the Estonian Swedes was over. The Nazi taint had corroded the curiosity about the Estonian Swedish minority, and the fact that Swedes had once lived in Estonia was gradually forgotten.

  After my year in Estonia I came back to read their journals and books, and to learn more about the lost pre-war culture of the Estonian Swedes. Stockholm, so brash and commercial after Estonia, confused me then. The pink basement was a refuge, and I delved into the history.

  The first Swedish revival in Estonia, I learnt, started with a mission. Between 1873 and 1887, five evangelical missionaries were sent to the Estonian Swedish settlements. One of them, a man called Österblom, wrote a book about his stay on Ormsö, an island near Noarootsi.

  The island of Ormsö was owned by the Swedish Baron von Stackelberg. There were at that time more than two thousand people on the island, nearly all Swedish-speaking. They were hard-­drinking, poor people—landless peasants working for the oppressive Stackelberg in return for food. A few decades before the mission a Swedish ship ran ashore on the wintry island, and the baron invited the captain to stay. The captain saw people driven off the road into a snowdrift, and kneeling down in the snow to make way for the baron, who shouted and lashed out at them with his whip. Even the serfs in Russia, the captain wrote, were less enslaved: “At least you would see them happy, and hear them sing; the coastal Estonians, or Swedes, as they are still called, did not know any songs and did not seem to know what happiness was.”