Karl was also looking about edgily, but he couldn’t see the people who were following him. They’d parted company: one was holding back a little distance from Karl, who had made his way round the back of the Estonia Theatre and was hurrying through Tammsaare Park, while the other was following at a steady pace roughly twenty metres back. Indrek had his work cut out just to keep up with them. In his haste he nearly tripped over a little boy who despite the warm weather was wrapped up in winter clothes and tottering about helplessly amongst the pigeons. Indrek had no choice but to stop and listen as the boy’s grandmother, who was dressed in a brown felt coat and lilac headscarf, explained to him in a shrill voice how he was supposed to walk in the park. Indrek apologised as politely as he knew how, looking about the whole time. For a moment it seemed he’d lost sight of Karl and the spooks who were tailing him, but it was just that the two men had swapped places. One of them had come to a standstill, and by the time Indrek passed him, just before reaching the Kaubamaja department store, the man had slipped under an archway and was speaking on his walkie-talkie. Fortunately he was standing with his back to the street. There were more people here, so dodging through the crowd attracted more attention, but the spooks were so sure of themselves that they suspected nothing.
Karl had been informed about the location that morning, on a card pushed through his letterbox. It depicted Kreshchatyk Street in central Kiev, not St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, nor the Hermitage in Leningrad. That meant that he had to stuff the envelope into a certain tree hollow in Pasatski park. Karl hadn’t previously had to deliver anything in the daytime and in such a busy area, and his heart was pounding, but if that was the instruction, there must be a good reason for it. His heart pounding, he glanced around and put his briefcase down. A couple of benches ahead, a man with the typical purple nose was gripping a bottle of beer, but he seemed to be sufficiently occupied with his own personal problems. Karl removed the envelope from his briefcase and took a couple of steps on to the grass, in the direction of the right tree.
What happened next was like in a film. Probably. He didn’t watch those kinds of films himself, because the role of the good guy was always given to the upstanding Soviet intelligence officers, whom he could not stand. Maybe what happened next was actually the reverse of those films, but that wasn’t important. Two men dressed in identical illfitting suits appeared in the park as if from nowhere. Karl watched them like a rabbit hypnotised into submission by a cobra: he couldn’t even move his arms, to say nothing of trying to run away. He watched with a frozen gaze, as if observing the scene from one remove, as the envelope was yanked from his hand, his arms were twisted behind his back, and he was marched back the way he’d come, towards the park entrance. But then he recalled that a few moments earlier his temporal lobe had registered the screech of brakes. An unmarked black Volga with two men in it, one driving and one in the front passenger seat, had driven on to the footpath. Just as he realised what was happening. He was bundled into the back of the car, and one of the men who had been following him got in, coming crashing down beside him.
The other man came to a standstill next to the car, opened the envelope, looked at the photos of the brutish soldiers beating the Georgian women with spades and shook his head.
“Fucking degenerates,” he mumbled to himself. It went without saying that the rest of the world should never be allowed to see photographs like this.
He took his walkie-talkie out from inside his coat, stepped off the path and under the trees.
“All taken care of,” he reported. “I’ll stay here on guard.”
Chapter 4
A word about telephones.
I’m not sure where to start, or how to write about this without making it seem trivial. It’s a question of feelings (most things are a question of feelings, let’s not pretend otherwise). I was probably still in the last year of kindergarten when a telephone first appeared in our house – or maybe I’d already started the first year of school. Our telephone number was 442-75. Our first telephone was pretty ugly, and it was probably issued to us with the number, but soon it was replaced by a really cool red one which was to sit on father’s big writing desk. At that time we lived in two rooms of a communal flat, together with two other families. Me and my brother Mihkel shared one room, and my parents were in the other one, where father also worked. The flat was in an old and soundly built pre-war building, with high ceilings and a spacious corridor. There was also a Pescadas toilet dating from the first Estonian Republic in the bathroom. I remember that there were also neatly cut squares of newspaper on the nail meant for toilet paper, and at one point there were Soviet state loan bonds there too, given to Soviet workers in the 1950s as part of their salary. By the time I started using that toilet the workers had long lost all hope of being able to cash in those bonds.
The red phone is my brother Mihkel’s most enduring memory of that flat, but possibly he was as a child in awe of that intermittently clanging object, and our parents later told him that it was his main memory from the time. Who knows? Human memory is a wondrous thing.
Not that my brother and I had much need for a telephone when we lived in that apartment. It was in our new home on Harju Street, where we moved after my sister was born, that I soon developed an out-and-out addiction to it. I would sometimes talk to friends for hours on end. We didn’t play battleships – at least not very often – but we talked at length about anything we could think of. In those days we didn’t have to pay for phone calls, and I constantly kept the line engaged, which really annoyed our parents.
Two smells
I have said this before, and I will say it again: two smells are lost from my life, one of them was a good one, one of them bad, but both were my companions for a long time. How could I have forgotten them? When I woke, especially on Sunday mornings, they came to greet me through the open window: burning briquettes and freshly baked pastries. Our home had municipal heating, whereas black smoke billowed from the chimneys in the old town, dissolved into the air and mingled with the smell of pastries coming from the shops on Karja Street and the Pearl and Tallinn cafés. Within moments of waking I’d pulled on my trousers and shirt, done up my laces and was out the door! The pastries were still warm when they reached our breakfast table, and there was rarely anything left over: folded puff pastries and feather-light curd cheese pockets, but best of all, those Vienna pastries topped with yellow confectioner’s cream, which the Communist Party and government had decreed should be called Moscow pastries, even if no one had ever heard of them in Moscow. Sometimes they arrived straight out of the oven, left to cool on the back table of the shop just long enough to be put in the bag. Meanwhile, deposits of briquette smoke built up on our windowpanes, and most probably in our lungs too – there is probably some left even now. Both of those smells disappeared at almost exactly the same time. The briquette smoke wafted away with the people who moved from the old town to the new city districts, making way for better-off occupants. New pipes, new cabling, and new heating were installed in those grimy old houses. And the pastry shops closed their doors for the last time, because those pastries were replaced with a product which always tasted exactly the same, made by people somewhere far away, whose names and faces we did not know.