Raim could clearly remember when his whole life was still ahead of him. When he was at school he’d gone to acting club and found he was pretty good at it. If he’d been born a decade or so earlier he would have been beckoned by a lucrative career playing the brutish SS officer in one of those countless Soviet war films with more or less identical plotlines. But since he could not be born until his parents had decided they did not want to live out their long conjugal life alone, that option was not viable, nor was the prospect of studying to become a solicitor or doctor – in other words, making a career for himself as his parents would have wished. There had been a fleeting moment when he weighed up going in the opposite direction – Komsomol, international youth camps, romantic evenings by the campfire and Czech girls with names like Libuše. But he wasn’t ready to betray his ideals. And he didn’t particularly care what his parents thought. What was he supposed to make of two people who had been so ready to make compromises for the sake of an easy life? Exactly.
Lidia Petrovna is sitting in the kitchen in her dressing gown, smoking. Over the years she’d developed the ability to see herself from one remove, to make an accurate and sometimes harsh appraisal of herself, although that never caused her to change her behaviour, it didn’t help her avoid constantly stepping into the same traps. And now it had happened again: she found herself waiting for those visits with her flesh, but not with her soul. After that first crazy afternoon (she’d eventually put the flowers in the vase and cut the cake into slices), she took a long time getting herself ready for their next meeting. She carefully chose the clothes to wear, the snacks to serve, the background music. She knew that they would never go to the opera, or a concert, or for a walk in the park. That was all right. It wasn’t the most important thing. But now, when she didn’t even apply cream to her face, or perfume her body in the places where she longed to be kissed? She took a cold, sober look at herself and concluded that this was a woman who had let herself go. Eventually her flesh would grow soft too, and the routine would finish off anything that was left.
Raim leans against the door frame, looking at her and thinking: how did I ever manage without her?
“I have to go now,” he says, because he really does have to.
Chapter 32
“It’s not a good idea for it to be the same person every time,” Indrek had told Raim. “You really should spread the risk. You might have such a pro tailing you that you don’t even notice.”
Raim had just got the latest consignment of films from Li and was supposed to go and meet Maarja to pass them on.
That had been an hour ago. Now Indrek was pacing up and down in front of the Kosmos cinema. He’d already thought up a reason why he and Maarja should go and see the jointly produced Soviet-Polish film Witch’s Lair, about a space expedition to establish contact with wild tribes on a planet where evolution had gone off course, and work out where the concrete roads and sharp tools had come from. Indrek had decided that the film was just right after reading in the periodical Screen that it tackled sensitive topical issues using the medium of science fiction and allegory. Besides it was much safer to hand over the package in a darkened cinema. The main thing was that Maarja wouldn’t turn out to be some prude waiting for her prince. Then they could go to Aigar’s place – he’d gone to the countryside and left his keys with Indrek. They could light some candles and listen to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and see how things went. Hopefully she’s not having her period.
And there she was. Not alone, as Indrek had hoped, but with a friend, the one with the long plait of dark hair, who was standing to one side and waiting for her.
“Raim couldn’t come,” Indrek said, quickly glancing left and right before taking the films out of his jacket pocket.
“Ah,” said Maarja, putting the films into her bag. “Pass on my best wishes then.”
They looked straight at each other for a moment.
“Bye then,” Indrek said sullenly before going into the Kosmos cinema. Even if nothing had come of his other plans, it was still worth going to see the film.
“Excuse me, do you mind if I sit here?” the young man asked in Russian.
Maarja looked up. He actually had no reason to ask, as there was no one else apart from a couple of middle-aged lovers sitting by the window there on the second floor of the Black Swan, and there were plenty of other places available. But Maarja remembered this young man welclass="underline" one time he’d been coming up the stairs just as she was leaving, another time he’d walked past her at the tram stop, and one time, or maybe even twice, she’d seen him drinking a cup of coffee and maybe a brandy by the counter here.
She could remember his eyes.
Let’s make it clear from the start, this wasn’t any ordinary young man.
“Of course, please do,” Maarja said.
“Sorry to disturb you, it’s just that it seems like it’s not the first time I’ve seen you here, so I thought…”
“Yes,” said Maarja.
“I have to go now,” said Alex, “but I hope that this won’t be the last time.”
“Yes,” said Maarja.
“Let’s meet again, either here or somewhere else.”
“Yes,” said Maarja.
Karl could still remember that strange feeling of emancipation which overcame him the first time he consciously did something in a way his mother wouldn’t have wanted. He didn’t love her any less, but needed to assert his right to make his own mistakes. And to take responsibility for the consequences, even if that was the less enjoyable part of it. He had old-fashioned values, and no desire to go with the times. He couldn’t understand people who had no problem doing so; he’d never been able to resign himself to the idea that this is how things are and this is how they have to be. He would’ve liked to have been a character in a Chekhov play, to be able to suffer a wasted life with dignity and nobility. But unfortunately he’d been born in a time and place where there was nothing dignified or noble about a wasted life – although that wasn’t in any way his fault of course.
He’d been horrified to read about how the Soviet authorities had driven the chemist Jüri Kukk to take his life in a hunger strike, and others who’d been martyred for the cause of Estonian independence. So he’d joined the opposition forces to try and stop things like that ever happening again. Not so that they would happen to him too. He knew that the situation could not last much longer as it was: in all probability he would be sent to Seewald psychiatric hospital and pumped full of drugs until the world around him turned into amorphous semolina. Until he no longer cared. But however things turned out, he would never get his own life back now. Just like after a car crash, when you wake up in a wheelchair, or like a blaze that destroys your home. Some things remain, some things persist, but nothing can be as it was before. He’d heard about someone being taken all the way to Moscow, for “examinations”, as they put it. There, you didn’t even dare to eat the food: you could hide tablets under your tongue and spit them out later in the toilet, but you couldn’t protect yourself from what they put in your porridge.