Yes, if I had wanted to be completely honest and open, I should have said, My dear miss, I don’t really have command of anything, and maybe I even got into the corporation because I don’t have command of anything. Why talk about German or English, when even my Estonian is faulty, because I studied French, which has remained poor because of English, while my English limps along behind my German, and my German is hobbled by English and French? Everything I have studied I know only to the extent of wanting to be what I am not. If I want to please others – and every young person does – then it is with some foreign mannerism or trick, a foreign language or custom. And I am a little troubled that this is the way I best display my intellectual clumsiness and mental immaturity, and thus I detract from my own and others’ respect, because I and my companions don’t have much of that. I am proud but have deficient self-confidence, and I am haughty, but low on self-esteem. It’s as if I had grown up among upstarts, who would make grand gestures while cringing at the same time, make promises but break their word, and take on obligations but not think of fulfilling them unless they were financially rewarding. I and my contemporaries regarded ourselves as smarter than our fathers, more advanced, more cultured, but we lived with blameless hearts at their expense, and willingly extended and multiplied their mistakes or we ruined what they had created. I don’t have any use for becoming myself, being myself and staying that way, as some foreign poet exhorts me to, because I have always seen, heard and read quite the opposite: everyone tries to become, be, and stay something else, not themselves, and I want to be like everyone else. Or should I and my contemporaries really become virtuous – be ourselves?
No, my dears! I come from the country, but I don’t know if I would please anybody by doing that, when every boy and girl is rushing to the city. I am an Estonian, but I don’t know where I should boast about that. I am a student, but these days that is appealing only when I have my coloured cap on, as if that item itself were the educated Estonian. Take note of that, dear miss, if you don’t want to be disappointed in me. For it follows from all that that I don’t have much belief in myself: no one can believe in what he doesn’t have. Only once in my life have I felt that belief with all my body and soul, all the blood in my heart, and others should have felt it together with me, but about that, dear miss, I cannot tell you, because that would lead us finally down to Võnnu, about which you probably don’t want to hear. It would lead us to a completely unknown man, who said to us, “Brothers! Every one of us has been up against two, three, maybe even ten Russians, even a dead Estonian has come up against a Russian – so can’t a living Estonian come up against a German, who is mortal?” Never mind that the speaker himself perished – we won because we believed, and even I believed, in ourselves. But that belief has vanished; I don’t know why. That is what I should have said if I’d wanted to be open.
And yet, obviously I’m deceiving myself and the reader too. At that time these thoughts scarcely occurred to me, but came to me later and still are as I write about it. Then I would more probably have asked, Isn’t it more likely that she wasn’t so much ashamed of me as afraid of her own people, who would immediately pass on to her grandfather and auntie, to the whole clan, that our meetings should be eliminated at all costs, although Erika might have to change her position in service or even lose it? And of course I consoled myself then that she was more afraid of her own folk than ashamed of me or my stumbling use of language. She was more ashamed of herself and her own plain raiment than of me and my awkwardness, and therefore she refrained from appearing in places where there were bright lights and eager eyes. For in this world there is nothing more humiliating and shameful than poverty, which is seen in your face, your look, your clothing and your jewellery.
And she didn’t want to let me pay with my own money for tickets, as she would recall our conversation about the broken gloves; spending her own pennies more often at the cinema was obviously beyond her means. She seemed to have a different understanding of money to myself and many of my contemporaries. We borrowed without troubling ourselves too much about when and who would pay back the loan for us. We all had some sort of hopeful faith in our futures and our surroundings, while she seemed to live only in the present, where deprivation prevailed.
And so, in the rain, our only natural shelter was those awnings that stood in the park on the ends of posts, but we could use even those only rarely, because under most of them we found others who also seemed to have nowhere to go. The situation was made especially difficult because I didn’t even have an umbrella and I had to borrow one in emergencies from the landlady, who was of course very obliging, but looked me in the eye with such an expression that, like it or not, I had to come up with reasons why I needed shelter. But she would always block my excuses and say with a laugh, “Don’t do too much terrible explaining, otherwise I’ll think you’re fibbing – that your conscience isn’t clear.” That made things embarrassing, and so on many occasions in the autumn I walked in the drizzling rain without an umbrella, just my coat collar pulled up, while Erika, on the spot, carried a little umbrella, which scarcely covered her shoulders and dripped water either on to my head or under my collar, if I didn’t walk at a suitably respectful distance.
But all this essential shabbiness did not dampen our spirits at all; in fact, we felt like two orphans who had suddenly stumbled on some fairyland. In the dampness of an autumn evening we dreamed of our shared future. Or rather, I did, and her silence or indirect words indicated her assent. For example, she might suddenly interrupt my plans: “You should practise speaking German more often.”
“We should speak German together one day, and Estonian the next day,” I said.
“Estonian is terribly difficult,” she opined.
“Well, I’ll teach you it,” I promised, without taking my own promise seriously. Life and circumstances seemed in general to me crazily easy at the time, and I was ready to share out all sorts of promises.
“But then you’ll have to learn German properly,” said Erika to counterbalance my words.
“I’ll be speaking it like my mother tongue,” I pledged.
“You really will?” she asked with suspicious pleasure.
“I will,” I assured her, adding, “but you will then have to learn to pronounce our õ sound so that when the children…” The words died in my mouth, but that was of no use, because my last utterance made me feel terribly ridiculous. But either she didn’t notice the ridiculousness or pretended not to, and said, “Unlucky children! That letter will break their tongues in their mouths. Why does such a ghastly letter exist? Can’t you get by without it?”
“That letter is our national pride,” I explained. “Through it we’re related to the great and small nations of the world.”
“Who do you mean?” she asked.
“The Russians and the English, for example,” I replied. “A linguist explained to me once that just by tracing our õ sound you can conclude that our future will be great and brilliant or great and brilliant has been our past. I of course preferred the future, but the linguist was content with the past, because he thought a dead ancient Greek to be worth more than some obscure nation that still survives today. So you’ll definitely have to change your opinion about our õ, if you want to be happy.”