My education is such that it can be called secondary or higher, as you wish. In my own opinion I have a higher education, because I have spent two and a half years at university and sat the Latin examination there, and I have documentary proof of this, if needed. I took off the fox fur and I was awarded the colours, so I am a full member of the graduate community. I left the university at my own wish, because I could no longer find any friends who wanted, were able or dared to lend me any more money. But through friends I became an intern at a bank for a few months, and afterwards obtained a permanent position at a ministry, which I lost because there were men and women, older and younger than me, who could prove that they had a greater right to my position or that they were better suited to it. So here I sit in my attic room for the umpteenth month, waiting for better times. Thank God the owner of this old two-storey wooden house believes in better times; otherwise he would have had to throw me out long ago and taken on a new lodger, someone enjoying slightly better times than I am right now. I pay ten crowns a month for the room, but I haven’t paid it for three months. The owner evidently believes that I will pay my debt one day. May God keep his faith firm and perform a miracle, so he won’t have to be disappointed in me or in other people.
So it’ll take a miracle for the landlord to get his rent from me soon, but I may get out of my present situation by more worldly assistance: I could go home to the farm. But that’s not what I want, for a hundred reasons, and those reasons don’t only concern me, but also my father and mother, my sister and brothers, in fact all my family, friends, acquaintances and associates. Despite all that, returning home to my parents’ embrace would require a degree of heroism or desperation from which there would be no escape. Thus I’ve decided to find a way out by writing the only novel that every educated person has to hand – for am I not an educated person? – that is a novel about myself. For God’s sake, let no one think that I believe I have a special talent or power, that I’m hoping for the arrival of some holy spirit in whose light everything will be done almost painlessly, as if by itself. No, I believe first of all in work, especially as I’ve read that one particular genius believes his works are ninety-nine per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration. Now if geniuses bring about their works almost purely through labours, why can’t I? And anyway where is the man who can say where the work ends and the talent begins in the case of modern novels? That is only for coming generations to decide, or not even for them. Nowadays the proof of a talent is the work done, which is like a talent. That’s why no first prize is ever given for even the most divine poetry, but it’s given for a great novel, however mediocre it may be. Talent is a gift from God and it would be immoral to reward anyone for what God has given them.
If I had some special gift which is called a divine spark, would I be troubling my head or heart about such worldly things as privation and hunger? Wouldn’t I warble like a skylark so that everyone would envy my great joie de vivre? Out of my tears and great sadness that sometimes snare my heart, I would make something that creates the illusion of an earthly paradise everyone would yearn for. Now, when I lack that divine spark, I think for the umpteenth time as I write these lines about how at six o’clock the doors of the grocers’ shops will close and I haven’t yet put anything between my teeth today, and I don’t have a crumb in the house to put there. For ages I’ve been fretting about going to the shop, but I’m still writing, although I know that in the end I’ll have to go anyway. And today I can go – not to the shop directly outside the courtyard, because I don’t have enough money to pay my old debts, but I’ll go to the one around the corner with my head held high.
Does anyone know why some people grow the nails of their index or little fingers long? I grew the index fingernail long on my right hand, although I didn’t know why I was doing it. But today my eyes were opened while I was eating: the long nail on the index finger is a great help in skinning smoked Baltic herring. It can be wonderfully adept at removing skin, even from a half-dried herring. Having arrived at this conviction, I couldn’t resist wondering how every senseless thing in this world has its own little purpose. The same should apply to hunger and privation. Where in the world could you put old crusts of bread, dried sprats, rancid herrings and stale hunks of rye bread if there weren’t people going hungry and living in privation? No, there would be nowhere to put them, and no one to sell them to, and they would go to waste, which would do great harm to the economy. But now, thank God, everything moves on, everything bears fruit, whether it be half-rotten apples or mouldy strawberries, worn clothes or galoshes with holes, scrap iron or dog-chewed bones.
As I ate, marvelling at divine order and dispensation, it appeared to me suddenly that throughout my whole life I have seen nothing but privation and hunger, and that it alone rules the world. My common sense tried to reject this, but I still felt this was right. Since childhood I have heard of nothing but privation and hunger. When my mother went to give straw or hay to the animals, my father always said that whether a lot or a little, she would have to give something, because a long winter lay ahead. Even in the spring he insisted that you had to be careful, because no one could be sure that the animals would find something in the forest. Even with the greatest care, there was always privation and hunger in the spring, and no one knew where to get fodder for the animals. The heifers had sometimes to be driven into the swamp, where they would gulp great mouthfuls of dry grass from the tussocks, and scattered clumps of reeds which stuck out here and there.
It was the same with people’s food: there was always talk of rationing, always calculation of how long this or that would last. And it didn’t last: very often the shortages would come. Of course there were times when they feasted, eating and drinking several times and beyond reason, but now it seems to me that that happened because tomorrow, and the day after, there would be so much to give up, and so they caroused today, just to get their fill of food and drink for once. Maybe everyone who eats and drinks too much in the world does it because of fear of the morrow, which may bring, if not hunger, then at least privation. There is still something today, there is still enough for today, so let’s eat and drink and be merry, because no one knows what the future may bring.
But I didn’t fight, did I? And my companions didn’t fight, at least I didn’t notice anything and nothing like that affected me. We had never seen our own mother’s and father’s heifers and piglets, and words about a struggle for a better future went in one ear and out the other, without affecting us in the least. And how were we supposed to fight from a school bench? By great learning? But we noticed too early that this better future that our fathers and mothers thought about at home would not fall into our laps because we’d got an education, quite the contrary: the better future would be tasted by those who haven’t learnt a thing, or who have, while learning, seen fashions, amusing pastimes, polite social activity. Those who acquire things are acquisitive but proper learning lessens acquisitiveness. This was the unavoidable conclusion we had to draw from our experience. Real learning trains the conscience, but we were growing up at a time when everyone was behaving as though such concepts were a logical error in need of urgent correction. Learning was supposed to awaken our mind and spirit, but everyone was living as if the mind was a silly fairy tale for children, and the spirit was only awakened by alcohol. Some teachers said that we had to learn so as to gain a sense of responsibility for our families, our relatives, our acquaintances, the whole Estonian nation and the homeland, because our whole future depended on responsibility, but we didn’t understand, or we forgot it when we saw that it was the irresponsible ones who were harvesting the fruit we’d been sent to school to obtain. Why worry our heads about it? So we could go bankrupt, like everyone else who had studied before us? Did our fathers and mothers study along with their piglets out in some remote forest, by a bog or on a hillock, so that we could learn to go bankrupt? Were they interested in science or art? Are they interested in it even now? Is that what they saw in our better future, and why they fought for it?