In the sauna the temperature rose again with the wild improbability of his story, especially when he told me that the KGB had caught wind of his win (and perhaps the toasted sprats). As he ladled more water onto the hot stones, he went on: ‘The local KGB goon came to arrest me. He marched into the hotel and barked, “Jaan Habicht, you are ordered to return immediately to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.” Luckily I had brought with me an emergency supply of Old Tallinn and I persuaded him to join me in a farewell toast, and then another, and another. At the end of the night I dumped him on the steps of the Soviet embassy, totally legless.’
Conveniently the Soviet Union then collapsed and Jaan – like Estonia itself – was free. Over the coming years his Irish success led to invitations to dozens of international barbecue competitions, enabling him to refine his repertoire: grilled ribs with apple-cowberry salad, barbecued salmon with vegetable tagliatelle and racy ginger-chilli sauce, chicken roll filled with Parmesan cheese, and pasta in a raspberry beet vinaigrette.
‘In Cape Town I served bullock fillet with fruit lasagne. In Memphis I smoked meat loaf doused in grated chocolate. But my greatest, greatest moment was in Kansas City.’
As the sauna grew hotter and hotter, I heard that Jaan’s reputation had brought him to the attention of the world champion Kansas City Barbecue Society. His full-blown eccentricity – cooking in a black jumpsuit, calling himself a Glasnost Cowboy, travelling with a collapsible two-level smoker that brought to mind a drum of enriched plutonium – made him a celebrity on the barbecue circuit. To prove the point the Kansas City organisers rented him a longer limousine than Mick Jagger, who happened to be in town for a Rolling Stones concert.
‘They told me that Jagger came to Kansas every other year but the presence of the Glasnost Cowboy was a once-in-a-lifetime event,’ he added, tears of laughter welling in his eyes. ‘All I needed was meat and a match.’
His ribs basted in blackberry-cherry-tomato sauce won first prize and a Midwestern entrepreneur asked to market him, coining the Soviet Secret Barbecue Society brand, despite Jaan being neither Soviet nor secretive.
‘We designed a special jar in the shape of an SS-32 nuclear missile. I was on the way to becoming a millionaire, except for one missing ingredient.’ He shook his head in mock gravity. ‘The basis of my secret sauce was tomatoes crushed by the unwashed feet of Tartu virgins. As soon as the Americans heard that, the FDA banned its import.’
In the blinding heat it no longer seemed to matter what was fact or not. Jaan kept both stories and coals rolling, stoking the fire, moving on to the European Championships in Milan where, in an act of sweet revenge, he told the judges that the barbecue hadn’t been invented in the United States but rather in an Estonian smoke sauna.
‘Naturally I won because the Italians hate the Americans.’
Over the years the thrill of the grill took Jaan to the Calgary Cowboy Cook-Off and the Clarence Oinktoberfest in New York State. At home he masterminded pig-outs at Tallinn’s Golden Grill Fiesta and – earlier that very day – hosted a party at the new National Museum, serving a celebratory meal of pork basted with paprika and Estonian cheeses aged in Old Tallinn and dyed with the national colours.
‘All pure and natural,’ he insisted in spite of Estonia’s colours being an unnatural blue, black and white.
‘It’s not all spin, you know,’ he insisted with a theatrical wink. ‘The secret…’ he whispered, leaning forward as the beads of sweat rolled down his face, ‘…is knowing how to get to the molecular level to tenderise pork tissues.’ With hand on heart he declared that he was happiest when wielding a spatula, but I was relieved to learn that he had not given up his day job. He told me that he continued to teach at Tartu University, his ‘Molecular Biology and the Barbecue’ course being particularly popular with carnivorous undergrads.
As Jaan shared more overcooked tips – dry the meat before seasoning and cooking it, leave it undisturbed on the grill for the first sixty seconds, rest it for twenty minutes before serving – I managed to summon enough clarity to reflect that native Estonians had often gone hungry over the seven centuries of occupation. If a piece of bread was dropped on the floor, the custom had been to pick it up, to kiss it respectfully, and to eat it.
‘Slow roasting really did originate in Nordic smoke saunas where meat – in a traditional baking oven – tenderises over two days,’ Jaan said before limbering up for a bout of mutual ‘whisking’ with a viht of birch branches to exfoliate and cleanse. But I could take no more of his fire. I was already burnt to a crisp. I was also very thirsty.
‘Drink before the barbecue,’ he declared with another wild laugh. ‘Drink during it and drink after it!’
Together Jaan and I stepped out of the sauna’s sharp heat and into the soft dusk, streaking down the bank and into Lake Võrtsjärv. Once the shock of cold water had receded, we floated on our backs, gazing up at the stars. In Estonia, as elsewhere in the north, the sauna was a place for physical and spiritual cleansing, for getting bare in all senses of the word, and even – it must be said – for blowing smoke.
‘It’s a barbecue world,’ said Jaan, the king of the grill. ‘It’s our world.’
KALININGRAD
20
The Others
The Baltic states are as unalike as England, Scotland and Ireland. Language, religion and temperament differ in the three countries. Estonians see themselves as Nordic Vikings. Lithuania – ‘the Baltic Italy’ – is peopled with devout Catholics. Latvians are rather laissez-faire about God and most Estonians don’t think He exists at all (how else to explain so many centuries of hardship?). Latvians believe that Estonians are slow-witted while Estonians claim that their southern neighbours lack coordination because they are born with extra toes. I’d asked Kristjan if the Estonians are one people. In truth, all three countries have been shaped by incomers.
Under communism, Estonians were the ‘Others’ in their own country. Russian settlers were trucked in, treated as superior, until they made up almost 30 per cent of the population. In Tallinn, taxi drivers – most of whom had come from the Urals – wouldn’t give rides to Estonian speakers. Shop assistants – a privileged position in a country where everything was in short supply – always served ethnic Russians first. But with independence, the roles were reversed. The incomers became the Others, and an unwelcome reminder of Soviet rule. The new government in Tallinn told them to make a choice: either apply to be an Estonian citizen or be classed as stateless. It was the same situation across the Baltics, except in one conquered corner of them.
A true and sincere traveller needs to read the runes, to seize opportunities and to change plans. Spontaneous decisions can open new doors, or lead to a dead end that wastes a week. On the southbound metallic grey Lux Express coach (with red go-faster stripe) I opened my passport for the third time to check my double-entry Russian visa. I’d decided to visit a place where the Others had taken control, after wiping out the original inhabitants.
For 700 years Königsberg had been German: a university town founded by Teutonic Knights, the coronation city of Prussian monarchs and the birthplace of Immanuel Kant. On its broad and leafy avenues had risen gothic towers, the Schlosskirche palace church and the Moscowiter-Saal, one of the largest ceremonial halls in the Reich. The city’s fabric and families had been enriched through the wheat, timber, hemp and fur trades. Its flourishing port had been the last known location of an ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’.