Wind carried more stories. Starkad was approaching, valorous, treacherous, famed, ridiculed, mighty singer forgetting his songs, protected by one god, cursed by another, incurably wounded but indomitable slayer of monsters, avenger of wrongs but jealous and thieving. An apt symbol of Estonia, the Herr General thought.
That Wotan was lord, not only of war but of music, poetry, prophecy and ‘the depths’, was all-powerful but had hung nine days on a tree puzzled me until Father suggested that, too often, music and wickedness were identical, so were power and powerlessness, like Germans in Estonia. Like Starkad? He smiled, as if at a joke, small, not very funny.
Father told few stories. The Herr General’s were not of Baldur but often of Loki, slippery and clever. The Teutonic, Baltic and Slavonic supernatural appeared a single mess of realistic enchantment, struggles against fate, through which stalked Hrolf, Kraki, Swipdagere, Svendal the Stranger, Frodi the Unthinking, Thorkill Red-Beard. Behind them, harvesters still shouted Svendal, Frodi, without knowing why, threw corn-cobs into the last sheaf before lighting it, watching rodents flee, spirits of the field. Flames ‘grew up’ in efforts to reach the sky. In November, Dead Month, servants were allowed a night’s freedom for orgiastic village celebrations of St Catherine, protector of cattle, and for the annual return of ancestors. Could Pahlen ever come? Apparently not. A scarecrow, Old Mart, earlier St Martin, originally, perhaps Mars, was periodically stuffed with wool, dyed green. And at midsummer God walked the grain fields and children dared each other to touch old Mother Stick’s hump for good luck. This I never risked, fearing a red curse or explosion.
Village children had two birthdays, one solemn, celebrated in church, the other rowdy, in the communal sauna. Conceivably, they aged at twice my own speed, and their early stoops and wrinkles supported this.
Vernacular phrases continued to illuminate. ‘Dark as the cuckoo’s shadow on a cemetery gate’, though to utter them would risk courteous derision. From the Turret nothing changed. Seagulls flashed silver, in the margin of stories. The Lake now glittered, now sank into mist. The sun was low on one horizon, the moon high above another. In a velvet-covered notebook – Father’s gift – I wrote, very proudly: ‘I will never permit myself to become another.’ Mysteriously, I later found beneath this, in handwriting almost, but not quite my own: ‘Use your eyes, but first keep them on yourself.’
Through summers I gazed down on expensive adults, die erste Gesellschaft, chattering on lawns, lighting cigars, standing in straw hats or under dainty parasols. Or, half seen through tall, clipped hedges, playing tennis, older folk clustered by rose-trees, drinking tea in deckchairs by the old summer-house, wheeled to face the sun, while children played in shrubberies, darted between trees, quarrelled. When possible I hid from them. Most were adept at games, brutally eager to win, and I disliked their taunts – ‘Book Lover’, ‘Clumsy Boots’, ‘Stump Head’ – ceasing only when the Herr General discovered my talent for tennis, for which I was winning small silver cups, not of the finest quality.
When Gulf breezes quickened and leaves staled, the men moved towards Forest with guns slanted, followed by bearers in green jackets with brass badges, carrying game-bags, dogs frisking around them.
As if both inside and outside the countryside was the girl who ran. She daily sped past our gates, resolute, absorbed in the way ahead. None of us knew her name, she might descend from Margarita-Who-Grieves or Marie-Filled-with-Woes. She might be pursued by the Seventy-Seven Devils of the Sound, for ever fleeing down dirt roads through woods, across fields. Once she paused to fasten a shoe and I dared, in German, to ask her name. Her black eyes were incredulous and at once she was gone. She, too, must know things. Servants shook their heads but said nothing until finally she never reappeared, a scullion gibing that she had tripped over the edge of the world. At sight of an animal wounded, or ostracized by the herd, I remembered the girl who ran.
Father was respected by our staff, as ‘Buckle-breasted’, Mother as ‘Brooch-breasted’ and was less popular. The Herr General was ‘Elk-Victor’, an outdoor strider, which my parents were not. From him I learnt to identify footprints, claw-marks, wing-patterns, the habits of crane and lark, fox and seal. Also Teutonic epics, Livonian hunting rituals, with their placatory invocations to the victims.
Mother was soft-spoken, vivacious, even coquettish, proud that the British had helped Germans and Balts evict the Reds at Narvik, 1919. I loved, without much liking her – feelings I traced, surely inaccurately, to her maid’s belief that the third finger of a woman’s left hand contained a spirit that only a gold ring could awake. Mother’s finger shone golden and was thus endowed with power splendid but unendearing.
She was small, fair, careless, with white, slender hands lying for display on her lap, on the table, rings removed only at the piano, when playing brilliant, jazzy rhythms, incongruous in the vaulted, raftered music-room. Her manner, in retrospect, suggested an unwalled Englischer Garten, bright in its very defencelessness.
Father, scholarly, reserved, finely boned, somewhat dry, tired around mouth and eyes, grey hair scrupulously tidy, and with his High Folk beard, came from long generations of Baltic barons, Volksgruppe. He had rather melancholy eyes, dignified regard for Haydn, Mozart, Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, Turgenev’s novels, though reticent about Pahlen, the regicide. His forebears had emigrated from Westphalia to join the Teutonic Knights, brutal overlords, ‘Wolf People’, though protective against the hated Muscovites. Peter, Bronze Horseman, and Catherine, ‘Frau Potemkin’, were remembered as dragons. For his underlings, Herr Max, German and bullying as Bismarck, was always ‘the Tsar’ or ‘Hetman’. From some book I never forgot an engraving of a bearded face under a peaked, jewelled cap, eyes wide, staring, and an inscription: Thou has shed the blood of righteous men, O Tsar. Behind us all, defence against Untermenschen, was the Herr General.
Tall, broad as a door, brown hair cut close, firmly carved face unlined, florid, clean-shaven, he had eyes deeply blue beneath heavy lids, reflecting moods seldom precisely ascertainable, though doubtless shrewd and appearing older than his agility. Related to the still influential Benkendorffs, Tiesenhausens, Meyendorffs, he was wealthy, with an estate larger than ours. He was restless, roaming across rooms rather than merely crossing them and often abroad on what I assumed to be adventures. In 1937 he was over thirty, for, after training at the Imperial Staff College in St Petersburg, he had commanded a German White Russian force after the 1917 Revolution. Years afterwards I understood that he had helped establish a complex of arms foundries, airfields and training bases in Soviet Russia to help Germany circumvent the Versailles Treaty. Of Estonians, he told me that they all hoped their neighbour’s cow would die and assured Mother that a German Republic was not paradox but contradiction. ‘The Reich has iron heart and a lonely spendthrift soul.’ Of the Führer, no glamorous Hohenstaufen, he said that he had heard him declare that no truth existed, scientific or moral.