But of course this wasn’t exactly the Hermitage. The outskirts of Leningrad were as packed with palaces like this as an autumn forest is packed with mushrooms.
He carefully read the name tags of all the sculptures he could see, since he didn’t have a clue who or what this Kalevipoeg might be. This became tiresome, since it was already several minutes past two and he was worried that the person who was supposed to pass him the package would give up waiting. But as he walked past the sockknitting old granny and came to a standstill in the middle of the room he simultaneously realised two things: that the whopping great stone man in the corner of the room must be the Kalevipoeg he was looking for, and that no one was waiting for him there.
Why was that?
He walked up to the sculpture to make sure that this was indeed the right Kalevipoeg. Yes, there was the name Oskar Meering, 1890-1949. What next?
If he hadn’t been so sharp-sighted then he might not have noticed the tiny package at all.
Hmm.
As I write these words my thoughts continually return to the same subject: the divide between two different worlds. For my children Soviet Estonia is like a distant planet. That’s fine. I understand why, and it’s better that way. Buying butter and vodka with rationing coupons is as far removed from today’s everyday experience as the Second World War was for me during my childhood.
But those who do remember don’t need much to bring that period back to life for them, together with all its sounds and smells, albeit fainter now. People who weren’t there want more. And maybe they’re disappointed when they don’t see what they expect to see: pictures of Lenin the size of buildings, shops with empty shelves, and Soviet soldiers on the streets, smashing up the violin belonging to the little boy in glasses.
There were pictures like that, but we only saw them a couple of times a year, on the Communist public holidays. And neither were the shelves empty, it was more that no one wanted to buy any of the stuff which was available. It was true that you could only get hold of cars and other big items through work and waiting lists, or by paying twice as much (the “market price”), which the majority of people couldn’t afford. But as far as I remember those wretched coupons were only around for a couple of years, when the regime was already on its last legs. As for smashed violins, you can see them in Soviet films, although they tended to depict the fascists doing the smashing.
Of course the Russian soldiers got up to all sorts of stuff here as well. And it wasn’t just them. I recall one time when I was coming home on one of those dark winter nights after a school party – I must have been twelve or at least at the age when we had dancing at our parties – my hair was long, much to my father’s consternation, and I was walking back carrying a plastic bag full of records. They were compilations of big band music performed by the James Last Orchestra and released by the Soviet Melodiya company’s Riga studio: my friends and I thought that the music was very cool, and those records weren’t at all easy to get hold of. At that time there was a Russian-language maritime college next to our house, and the drunken would-be sailors often made a racket round the neighbourhood. They weren’t really genuine “occupiers”, like the soldiers, but they still wore naval uniforms. Anyway, on this occasion I was walking home down the empty street when one of them approached me and, without much ado, grabbed hold of my throat and pushed me up against the wall.
“Now then, let’s see what you’ve got there.”
“I haven’t got any money on me,” I replied, “please let me go.”
“No, no. Let’s see what you’ve got there,” he said.
At that moment I truly believed that he wanted to take my records off me (maybe that says more about the particular historical period than anything else). But then, through his glazed expression came the dawning realisation that despite my long hair I wasn’t actually a girl. And so he let me go and staggered onwards, while I went in the opposite direction, shaking.
To tell the truth, one can’t say that this episode was unique to the Soviet Union. A drunken yob is a drunken yob whether or not he’s wearing a foreign uniform. But back then I naturally held the Kremlin directly responsible for that brutish behaviour.
In the 1970s we took pride in believing that here in Estonia we were more cultured than in Russia, and we never normally had any reason to feel ashamed. In those days we were a cultural vanguard and not the backwater we are today. True, I know plenty of people who still feel disgusted when they see any kind of Soviet designs, because they are permeated with negative associations. And vice versa: on one of my first trips to Sweden, at roughly the same time as the events in this novel, I came across a shop selling fashionable clothes bearing perestroika slogans, amongst them was even a red cap with the letters “KGB” written on it in yellow. Evidently someone wanted such things.
There is no need to explain how different life would be in Estonia if we hadn’t lived under the Soviet yoke for fifty years. Without the night-time knock-knock at the door. Tens of thousands of early deaths would have been avoided, countless homes would still exist, the Estonian nation would not have been scattered far and wide across the planet. But still, there are some things which would have been the same, or almost the same. True, in place of Soviet Sajaanid lemonade, we would have had Sprite. All of that time would not have been wasted in queues, money would have actually been worth something. And yet our parents and grandparents would still have yearned for light-coloured furniture in the 1960s and dark furniture in the 1970s, and miniskirts would still have come into fashion when they did. Equally I don’t think it’s right that our urban spaces are covered with garish advertising hoardings, just as our once virtually bare town centres would feel like some kind of aberration.
But our everyday life was different in some fundamental way back then.
What was different was a certain feeling. How we felt inside. Even those of us who were born decades after those night-time knocks on the door.
It’s hard to explain if you weren’t there.
Chapter 26
“Now then, Comrade Captain, I’ve got one piece of good news and one piece of bad news,” Vinkel said to Särg with a sneer. “And I’m guessing you want to hear the bad news first as usual.”
“So you’ve found out where to get hold of bison shit then,” Särg said gruffly.
“Right.”
The two of them were standing by the window in the spot where the younger members of staff took their cigarette breaks, at the end of a corridor which was painted the repulsive shade typical of Soviet state institutions, although the paint was already flaking off. There was a glass jar full of cigarette butts on the windowsill, bits of white paper label still stuck to it where the glue had proved particularly stubborn.
Särg was waiting.
“I’ve got something on your son,” Vinkel said hesitantly, almost reluctantly. “You really should keep a closer eye on him, to be honest.”
Just in case you haven’t heard this anecdote
The American Indian chief Winnetou was a character in the novels of Karl May (1842-1912), a popular German writer and a notorious trickster. A series of films based on these novels was shot in 1960s West Germany, with the lead role played by the French actor Pierre Brice, and the films proved extremely popular in the Soviet Union.