Nonetheless the fact remained that when the next Independence Day came along and the TV showed the military parade followed later in the evening by the president’s speech from a national venue, Sofia was left with two worries and convinced herself that she wouldn’t be up to it – she was bound to stumble when inspecting the troops or trip up over her words, and she couldn’t make that kind of speech and what was more, she didn’t want to. She didn’t like standing up in front of her class, let alone wanting to be on the TV. There would be loads of people picking up on every little slip and gloating over them all. Besides, who could force her if she really didn’t want to?
Independence Day, with its snow or cold and the military parade, always brought four words to her mind – the Battle of Paju – words that seemed to embody all the elements of the Estonia’s independence: a cold, snowy, bare field… and blood… There was no way that she, as a woman living her life now, would want to be anyone like Kuperjanov – because she’d turn out like Joan of Arc – as a woman she definitely did not want to be a heroic figure in that mould. On the other hand she would definitely want to be someone who could be relied on… And there’d been that dream of hers that had worried her: a dream she’d had when she was still very small, before she could read or write, or even really knew anything very much about either the Estonians or their presidents.
She had dreamt that three flags fluttered on the sledging hill at her kindergarten: one was red, one was red with little light blue waves, and one had three stripes – blue, black, white. The last of the three fluttered highest of all, above the others. When she’d woken up she’d told her mother about it and asked what the funny flag was, the dark one – but her mother didn’t know. Shortly afterwards the Estonians’ Singing Revolution had begun and they’d started to raise that very flag and Sofia found out what flag it was. She’d then had a feeling of déjà vu, a feeling that they were raising their flag partly for her, so that she would be able to fulfil her destiny… Fortunately at the time she hadn’t been able to explain it to anyone, and later she was astute enough to hold her tongue.
The Estonians really were different from the Russians. That much she had realised when she’d gone on an excursion to an open-air museum: there was a farmhouse without a chimney stack, a chimneyless dwelling, ancient… It must have been a conventional farmer’s home but one wall incorporated a log as thick as Sofia was tall. The log, roots and all, was part of the structure, and the flooring of the barn-cum-farmhouse was broad limestone slabs… In some ways it was clearly farmhouse-like with its tiny windows, low doorways and high sills, yet it had something eternal about it like the castles of long ago. Russian houses were built without foundations. When she went to St Petersburg once, they’d passed Russian villages along the roadside, houses closely packed one against the other and an older house, more twisted than the rest. Later her mother had told her that this was because the houses had no foundations. Where could people get stone for foundations? Russia was pure earth, there was no stone, whereas in Estonia there was stone aplenty and nothing but… To Sofia, this fact made the Estonians different from the Russians: the Estonians were here in their own land like a tiny sharp thorn wedged into the ground and they did the things they did in the way they had always done them; the Russians however seemed to be spread loosely across the surface of the earth, always ready to be on the move like the Ivan of Russian fairy tales who lay about on the stove and rode around on it… Ivan was lazy. The Estonians thought Russians were lazy but that wasn’t true. Or even if it was, then Estonians were no better for their busyness – they were just different. They were brusquer, clearer, more punctilious, whereas the Russians were more fluid, more discursive… Sofia couldn’t say which was better. Her mother was lovely – so round and buxom, like a gladiolus… Perhaps things seemed that way to Sofia because her mother liked gladioli. She always tried to give some to Sofia on 1 September to take to her teacher on the first day of school, although Sofia had now finally managed to get it through to her that it was no longer the custom to take flowers to your teacher on 1 September… Sofia liked to see them in a vase at home though; they were like an embodiment of her mother, white and pink gladioli… Only they always began wilting from below, just as the last blooms were emerging from the top. Time seemed to flow through their stems, and they had to cut off the wilted blooms at the bottom to persuade time that the gladioli were still flowering, otherwise they wilted as they bloomed…
She feared for her mother. Even though she’d found herself a new job, she didn’t seem to be at all happy about it. In fact she seemed rather dispirited. She went to work in the evenings and came back late when it was almost night. She had to be looking after someone seriously ill to be working lates for the family. The family drove her home late in the evening, so they were considerate, and from what Mum said the pay was decent. Sofia had already been fitted with braces on her upper teeth, there’d now be a break before the next big payment, and it wouldn’t be so big this time. Most of the money had already been paid, so there seemed to be more money for food than before. But it seemed that nursing the sick patient was grinding her mother down. Sofia would have gone with her to help, but her mother said it wouldn’t be right – in a strange flat… If Mum could go back to her old job in electronics, she’d been happy then, although tired sometimes… But now it felt as though she might wilt away and cheating time wouldn’t be an option…