Our group mostly had sentimental regard, though scarcely active loyalty, not to Konstantin Päts, former peasant, now president of Estonia, but to the High Gentleman, the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II. He was, however, mentioned less often than the Gutter King, ersatz Wolf, the Führer, much praised for promising that Germany would never injure European peace. Though the Herr General was conspicuously silent, most agreed that with the mounting Czech crisis, the Wehrmacht officers, modern knights, would depose the Führer and restore the Kaiser.
I could see Gutter King, dubious Wolf, as Robber-Knight in grass-green Loden jacket and foolish-looking shorts, prancing opposite the solid moustached Bear Chief in his golden-domed Moscow castle. Estate hands muttered, like their forebears, about the Russian Boot.
Faces flushed over the wine, tongues shook out half-stories.
‘Did you know, General, that precious Adolf informed the Reichsmarschall that he, Adolf, was the second Richard Wagner?’
The Herr General’s smile, often lopsided, went full and boyish. ‘I would not be astonished if Hermann failed to identify the first.’
A quip about Goering as Marshal of Telephones eluded me: I could imagine only a tusked warlord detained from battle by immoderate love of talk.
‘Flying champion though he was,’ the Herr General continued, ‘rather lovable in certain lights, I am sometimes forced to wonder whether, in all meanings save the most blatant, he has sufficient stomach.’
That he was ever forced into anything was as unbelievable as the legendary bridge made from fingernails of the dead.
‘Well, you know him, General. After your Karinhall hunts…’
‘I’ve taken care, Hilde, to be on respectful terms. He’s the Corporal’s only trustworthy friend.’
Unexpectedly he looked across at me and winked. I pitied the lonely Corporal, abandoned by all save Reichsmarschall and Herr General, and wondered who he was.
‘I will never forget my first sight of Goering.’ The Herr General turned to Mother, her eyes round as coins, brightly admiring. ‘He was in toga planted with emeralds, gold shorts, gold sandals, toenails crimson. More jewels in his scabbard. He had artificial tan, pasted thick, eyelids smeared blue. The lion beside him was as tame as his hounds.’
Germania in person. And lion! Also, the pistol, perhaps, perhaps not, in the Herr General’s pocket. And Pahlen, laughing with the Tsar he was to kill.
Debate swung to the Spanish Civil War, which, apparently, the Führer wished to prolong, mortally to divide Russia, France, Britain, Italy. The Herr General, conversational, lucid, attentive to Mother, punctiliously mindful of Father as host, frequently paused for assent without imposing it.
‘I’m archaic, Theo. A cave-monster. I regret the decline of duelling. The duel is prompt, vivid, conclusive. As for the widow we discussed earlier, I remember not her taste for duelling but her head for heights. She married successively a Hessian margrave, a French duke, though of Bonaparte variety, and a Bavarian prince with blood he assumed older than Adam’s.’
Mother led a flurry of laughter, Father smiled but as if at something else. Afterwards, in the Turret, I coveted gold lion, jewelled toga, then thought of bloodied feet dancing towards me in red shoes. I drifted against an Estonian poem Father had translated for me:
Light summer nights; northern glimmer opened swiftly on spectacular dawns and shrill birds. More phrases, overheard or plucked from books: Fearful Outcome, First Equerry, The Great Gate of Kiev, Unnatural Practices. Masturbation gave access to further delights, though, when boasting to a stable-lad, his crude rejoinder showed these were not unique.
I read greedily about the French Revolution, more engrossed with chance episodes than in principles: M. Dutart, arrested on suspicion of being suspect; Mirabeau’s thunder; citizens denouncing themselves, transfixed by the bright glow of Sainte Guillotine. The Revolutionary Calendar was beautifuclass="underline" Month of Buds, Month of Flowers, Meadow Month, Harvest Month.
Less instructive was school, a modernized hunting lodge for sons of Germanic gentry. Later, I must go to the Domschule at Reval, then to the German-dominated Tartu University. Lessons were strict and dull. I had no intimates, no enemies, desired neither promotion nor demotion, sat secure in private knowledge.Yet my fellows were pleasant, their parents family friends, always meeting at picnics, tennis, sailings down the Sound. Girls were aloof, guarded by Swedish nannies, at tennis moving with straight legs. What were they like? Impossible to ask. Paintings, statues might deceive, books were evasive, movies out of reach.
For companions I preferred coarse estate trainees, who, dodging work, would join me swimming, riding, climbing. Mihkel, Aadu, Juri. They asked my help in writing or reading German, sometimes asking about the Reich’s New Order.
On long summer afternoons families sailed to ‘Ogygia Island’, for wine, roaming cliffs and rocks, children’s games, the wide sands tropical in intensity of light. I began stories: ‘Es war einmal…’
Mother promised me a trip across water to Helsinki, always forgetting to do so, though apt to speak as if we had already been there. I had seen Reval and admired the copper spires.We stayed at the Lion d’Or, near Catherine the Great’s Kadriov Palace. ‘She added twenty-five thousand versts to her empire,’ Father said. ‘You might not consider this womanly restraint.’
Days were familiar but not monotonous. In the library Father would be reading, reading, reading, Mother entertaining friends, as if dreading loneliness, though loneliness, I now knew, was not the same as being alone. Pahlen would have understood. Then a hand might descend on my shoulder. The Herr General and Caspar had returned from Reval, Warsaw, Berlin, requesting, as he put it, the honour of my company. He knew my eagerness for tales of the Wide World. General Skobelov ordering himself to be whipped to death by ladies in a ‘Moscow hotel’.
Together we observed April wood-sorrel under fresh leaves, blue speedwell, mayflies quivering above greeny-white water, the November heron. He spoke of marshy Estonian humour, adding that we could well do without it. He described the Teutonic Knights and hunger for the East, hitherto dangerous for Germany. ‘It will need a fiery dragon to extirpate it.’
Unable to recognize ‘extirpate’, I imagined him commanding the Right Wing, dispersing communists and Germany’s eastern enemies with a flick of a whip, like an English lord. That he could ever undergo Rising Tide was unthinkable. He often laughed at himself but with the stance of one who could easily afford it. ‘Our Herr General is a poet.’ Father’s voice was inexpressive.
The Herr General stood with me, while birds rustled, the sky blue pieces between leaves. He shrugged at a passing woodman, bowed, trudging, saluting him like a teacher compassionate to a pupil under detention.
‘Swedes once ruled here, better than our animal knights, prisoners of the toxic. I’ve heard a farmer sigh for what he called the Golden Swedes, as if he remembered them himself. Later, these regions were mutilated in Peter’s Great Northern War with Sweden. This was the Great Wrath. Forests in flames, fields blackened, all towns destroyed, except Reval. Kalmuks, Peter’s delight but most primitive of the eastern hordes, he ordered to stamp down any survivals. People, beasts, plants. His generalissimo soon boasted that nothing remained to destroy. He was the only cock left crowing from Lake Peipus to the Gulf of Riga. We Germans supported the Tsar, to maintain our position.’