When I was at university I used to go to a public telephone centre to call home, and I had to book a call in advance and wait for the line to become available. Sometimes that could take a whole hour. Later, public phones appeared and you could slide your fifteen-kopeck coins into the slot and make the call yourself, but that didn’t speed things up much. After taking a while to dial the number, you would usually end up hearing the slow engaged tone coming from the handset at the end of its twisting metallic cord. But at least you felt you were in control; you dialled the number with your own fingers, without being at the whim of some old crone sitting behind the counter.
And so the feeling is very familiar to me. You need to tell someone something important – that you love them very much, for example – but they just aren’t home. Fifteen minutes later they are still not there. And fifteen minutes after that.
Our mental landscape was entirely different back then. There were the connecting nodes and then there were big black holes, a wilderness where your cry would never be heard. It was impossible to phone someone directly: you could only phone one of these connecting points, without knowing whether or not the person would actually answer.
I remember an advert for mobile phones which covered the whole side of a Tallinn tram. I can’t remember exactly what year it was, but it was some time immediately after independence, in the early 1990s. It was an advert for a really tiny handset, much more elegant than those you would normally see people with, with a price tag of twelve thousand kroons. My salary at the time was somewhere in the region of one thousand kroons a month, so this was more or less my income for a year (and we were relatively well off).
But that was all later, some time later than the day in question, when Indrek stood by the corner of the grey fire station and observed what was happening, and then hurried off to look for a public phone to call Raim, the person who had ended up in the role of leader of their small group, who was only called Raimond by his parents. In those days the main worries associated with telephones were whether you had a two-kopeck coin on you, whether the phone you found actually worked, and whether the person you called would be home. Not whether so-and-so’s phone battery might be flat, or whether someone is inside the coverage area. Times change, but problems remain.
Chapter 5
At the moment when the telephone rings, Raim is sitting having lunch with his parents. There is a tablecloth on the table, not because it is some sort of special occasion, but because that had always been the custom in Raim’s mother’s home, even if it meant they had to wash their tablecloths more often; they had a washing machine for that very purpose. Not one of those front-loading Vyatka automatics with a window in the door – she wasn’t sure whether she could really trust one of those – but the far simpler Aurika, where you had to lift your washing from one compartment to another so that the drier could do its work. But anyway, Raim’s mother has cooked some meatballs today. And at this very moment Raim’s father has just lifted up a mouthful on the end of his fork, and it is halfway to his open mouth. We don’t realise straightaway that they are meatballs, because they are swamped in sauce. Raim’s mother is in the habit of simmering her meatballs in sauce for a few minutes before serving them, again because this was the custom in her family – even though Raim and his father preferred their meatballs dry and crunchy. But the piece of meat on the end of Raim’s father’s fork hasn’t come to a standstill halfway to his mouth because he’s fighting his aversion to the food. No, Raim’s father’s mouth is open because he’s preparing to say something. And he knows exactly what that will be, even if he hasn’t fully formulated the sentence yet. Clearly it will be something to do with politics. Raim’s father wants to say that in the current situation only a crazy person, someone who is totally ignorant, who has taken complete leave of their senses, an idiot in fact, would say anything to rock the boat, which is sailing steadily towards a better and freer life. It’s never a good idea to poke a sleeping bear. The finest minds in the West have said that too, experts in their field, Sovietologists in academic institutes, each with a budget bigger than the whole Estonian economy. Moscow holds the keys. It isn’t a good idea to be hasty now that the straightjacket is starting to come apart at the seams. They should just keep moving cautiously towards the destination and be happy with what they have. For him personally it’s more important that he can go on a trip to Finland without having to apply for permission from the relevant departments (and that he’s allowed to exchange more than thirty-five roubles), not whether the blue, white and black flag of Estonian independence flutters on the Tall Hermann tower of Toompea Castle. And he’s convinced that the majority of the Estonian people, or at least those who are capable of thinking rationally, are of exactly the same opinion. Raim’s father knows that once he has formulated and stated his sentence it will lead to an argument. That Raimond, his only son, this blond-haired, broad-shouldered boy with his wilfully jutting chin, who can become all those things which he was not, will disagree with him again. That’s how it normally goes. He doesn’t like it, and who would, but he’s resigned to it. At least that way he has some sort of relationship with his son. It was the same way with his own father when he was young. And so he is annoyed when the phone call interrupts his chain of thought. But Raim is not, because for him those arguments with his father have long since lost any purpose. He doesn’t yet know who is calling, or if the call is even for him, but he has already decided that if someone is looking for him, then he will use it as an excuse to flee this scene of domestic bliss. So what if he is still hungry. If the meatballs weren’t covered in sauce, he would pick one up as he ran out of the room. But this is the way things are.
Chapter 6
Things weren’t exactly how the authorities thought they were back then: that a multitude of isolated, downtrodden people were embracing a vision of happiness and a historical mission which required them to speak a foreign language and to celebrate a foreigner’s victories – a vision which promised to unite them, to restore them, to make them greater. Neither were things as some people like to remember them today: cinders glowing valiantly in every hearth, ready to blaze up into a tall, proud flame as soon as the first bugle call was heard. There was a quiet war being waged for sure, but it was so quiet that even the sharpest ears might not pick up the rumble of its cannons, and the clever chaps abroad had concluded that peoples’ backs were so bowed that they would never stand upright again. That is until the newspapers told them quite how wrong they had been, leaving them unable to explain exactly what had happened. There was a quiet war being fought, but without a frontline moving backwards and forwards on demarcated territory. In the place of trenches there was something more like the circulation of blood, or mushroom spores: thousands, hundreds of thousands of little frontlines, passing through meeting rooms, wedding parties, family photographs, through individual people, who could be upstanding Soviet functionaries from nine to five and then turn into fervent idealists watching Finnish television in the evenings. But there is no point in asking if things could have been otherwise, only why those people’s descendants are the same to this day, even if they have changed their colours. The printed money wasn’t worth much back then, even if there were plenty of sweaty-palmed people with no scruples about handling it. There was however another important currency in circulation – trust. Some may use simpler terms such as acquaintances, contacts, but nothing would have counted without trust. Because in the end it was impossible to trust anyone if you hadn’t gone to school together, shared the same sauna, gone scrumping with them, studied together, worked in the same office, done military service together, stolen something, eaten and drunk with them, slept with them. If you trusted someone, you could share your books, your telephone numbers, your smoked sausage, your summer house, anything you had, even trust itself – names, places, times. You didn’t use a dentist whom you didn’t trust, you didn’t ask someone to pass a letter to your Swedish relatives if you didn’t trust them. If you could help it you had nothing to do with people you did not trust – they might very well be working for the other side.