“You know who that was?” I started to say.
“I know,” Rosita replied.
But unfortunately your file follows you wherever you go; you can’t escape it. After I finished university I worked as head of the literature section at Tallinn Puppet Theatre for a few years. One day my desk phone rang and a male voice introduced himself, in Russian, as a member of staff at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and said he would like to meet me because I spoke Japanese and a few other foreign languages. I said that I wasn’t interested, my field was the humanities, and commerce and industry were foreign to me. “What do you mean you’re not interested?” he asked, getting worked up. “We could even send you abroad for a bit… we only want a quick chat, what could you have against that?” I’d already had some contact with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, but for some reason he didn’t know about that; evidently information didn’t travel so well there either. I’d once helped out on a visit of some prospective investors from Japan who were interested in the Mistra carpet factory. So I remembered meeting one member of staff from the chamber and I knew that they had quite a different manner. But I didn’t say that to the man who was talking to me in Russian, and so he simply told me an address and the time I was expected there. When I approached the place, which was up on Toompea, I spotted a Volga car parked a little way from the front door, with the engine running and three men sitting inside. I reckon they were waiting for me. But I managed to quickly slip in through the door and head to my acquaintance’s office, who knew nothing of a supposed meeting with me, and thought that I might have been lured out of my house so that someone could burgle me blind – such things were known to happen. I asked her to call me a taxi, and when it arrived at the front door I ducked into it and drove off. The Volga didn’t follow.
In brief
This is me, right here and right now: I am a fifty-three-year-old man, husband and father of two. I am overweight, and from time to time I try to do something about it, but then I stop bothering again. I still take an interest in what is going on in the world. I have been lucky in life, I know that. I am surrounded by people whom I love. I enjoy my work, and my salary is sufficient. I have seen the world. My family wants for nothing. It is people just like me who think up those theories about us living in the best of possible universes – even if there is a lot of unfairness, there could be much more if things were different. I have plans, and I hope to fulfil them. I still feel happy when someone I don’t know praises something I have done, and I am sad if one of my friends tells me honestly that he thinks that my work is not up to standard. But I would rather be sad than live without those kinds of friends.
So then, I soon got another call from that man, and I recognised him by his voice again but this time he introduced himself as a member of staff from the State Security Committee called Oleg Makin (name unchanged), and said that he would like to discuss some matters of mutual interest. And perhaps I could suggest a café where our meeting might take place.
I said that he could come to see me at work at the Puppet Theatre. And so they came. Before they arrived I told everyone that if they wanted to see some real live KGB operatives, they would have a chance to very soon.
There were two of them. Both of them were wearing long leather coats. Oleg Makin and an Estonian who introduced himself as Viktor. Maybe his name really was Viktor, who knows. They didn’t have anything on me, although obviously they raised the subject of anti-regime views right away, to which I just said look at the newspapers, comrades: it was already 1987 and Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were in full swing. So the only thing that they could throw at me was that I’d discerned the Party’s new line before the Party itself. Then they told me that young people sometimes get carried away and need protecting against their own passions, and who better than the KGB to provide that service, as long as we know who, what, where and how. So it wouldn’t be a bad thing to meet at some café from time to time, because it’s good for us intellectuals to talk now and then. As we spoke various actors from the Puppet Theatre looked in through the door intermittently and giggled, which really annoyed my interlocutors. Eventually they realised that they weren’t going to get anything from me.
I saw Viktor several times again some years later, after Estonia had regained independence. He was working as a security guard and doorman at one of the embassies in Tallinn, a job which consisted of letting in people one by one from the queue for visas of dozens if not hundreds standing in the corridor. I had no idea whether the embassy knew about his record of public service, nor was it any of my business.
But I saw him, and I knew that he knew.
And he saw me, and he knew that I knew.
Chapter 10
Nowadays we talk about grass-roots organisations, local committees, neighbourhood watch.
Nowadays we would say: why don’t you set up a nonprofit organisation, apply for project funding, get yourself a website, you’re bound to get some interesting proposals.
But back then it was simply called the youth recreation room, under the auspices of the district housing service. Because of course it had to be administratively “under” something, and be given a name, to make it official.
The explanation was actually somewhat simpler: two fathers had been wondering what to do about their increasingly unruly children, and so they decided to roll up their sleeves and tidy up the large cellar under the house, which basically belonged to everyone and no one. They used all the means at their disposal and equipped it with a billiards table and carom board, and some other board games which didn’t take up much space, like chess and draughts. And two pairs of dumb-bells: one quite light, the other heavier. And a medicine ball. Against one of the walls they put a bookshelf with back issues of the magazines Thunder and Youth.
Those were actually pretty decent magazines.
And so the unruly children now had a place to go. As did their friends. And sometimes their friends’ friends. There was the usual smell of damp and plaster in the cellar, but that didn’t bother them. It was more important that no one was checking up on them. And they kept order in their territory themselves: once when two of the newer boys produced two bottles of Azerbaijani fortified wine from their school bags, they were politely asked to leave and never show themselves there again.
Indrek was the first to arrive. Fortunately he knew where the key was hidden. They had started locking the cellar a while back – sometimes from the inside as well. They still played billiards there just as before, but it was not the most important thing any more.