‘At home, our people preserve courage, hope, continuity. There will be false dawns, false prophets, Great Power amorality, cynicism. Our own resistance can falter. Josef Stalin once declared that the chief saboteurs are those who never commit sabotage, and, God preserve us, he was right.’ He finished, inclining towards a solitary press representative, by commemorating British sailors’ brave help for Estonians fighting Red Army, White Guards, in 1918, winning Independence and free Baltic waters.
My cubbyhole, cramped by drab brown walls, patched where pictures had once hung, was nevertheless mine alone, like the Turret where, Emperor Earth, I had watched the Pole Star, Nail of the Sky. At liberty to explore, I could ignore the Swabian warning against selling the dog and barking myself. The full text of the Pact demonstrated Goethe’s observation of Hatred in love with Hatred. Its Secret Protocol divided Poland into two slave settlements, recognized Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, outlined future treatment of Finland and Romania. Signing, Ribbentrop, I read, cock-crowed that he had the world in his pocket. His smirk at Hitler’s praise that he was greater than Bismarck smeared German history. He promised the Party that he had reduced Britain to trembling submission.
Ribbentrop ended on the rope, but Europe was simmering with nuclear threats. Balance of Power, Balance of Terror. The First Secretary issued constant warnings of SMERSH, Moscow’s Special Branch.
The Paris Conference had sprouted many replicas, Cold War manoeuvres financed by Moscow and Washington: concerts, exhibitions, books, journals, university posts, peace rallies. The Ambassador quoted Marx, that history is made behind backs. In the Germanies, communist and capitalist, ex-Nazis had unobtrusively climbed to high position, helped by Stille Hilfe, Silent Aid, conspirators bankrolled by the unrepentant and satyric. Lately, the West German security chief resigned, fled east, returned, pleading that he had been abducted under the influence of drugs.
The British, strangely late, were hunting a Fourth and perhaps a Fifth Man, leagued with the Cambridge Old Boy spies. The Wiesenthal Centre informed us of the East German secret police, Stasi, employing former Gestapo experts in pornography and drugs. A Stasi agent, Mr Allen, we knew, but could not prove, sat on CND National Council. Three KGB agents worked in the Royal Institution of International Affairs. The Odessa Association, said to receive Vatican funds, still flew Nazi scientists to Syria, North Africa, Ireland and across the Atlantic. The First Secretary learnt that Downing Street had considered reviving the Home Guard, against parachutists.
In our own street a bomb had been defused. Yesterday, a Baltic exile had been front-paged, lying on a Blackfriars railway track like a smashed crab.
In Europe’s black underside, Hungarian ministers had suddenly gibbered that they were British spies, a Bulgarian general was hanged for unbelievable deals with Israel. A famous American atomic scientist was dismissed on suspicion of pro-Soviet sympathies. McCarthy inquisitors spread black wings over Hollywood, several of my favourite stars displaying timidity – or need to engineer rivals’ eclipse.
Samizdats from Estonia divulged underground resistance throughout the Soviet Bloc, organized by Dr Vilem Bernard, Czech Social Democrat.
Elementary research disclosed to me that, with the Pact shattered, many Estonians had welcomed the Wehrmacht as liberators, and even a Soviet-managed bank co-operated with the Nazis in melting down gold from victims’ teeth. Balts had volunteered for the SS Einsatzkommando, Special Employment Unit, execution squads corralling Jews, Nationalists, commissars, for the bullet in the neck, electrodes clamped to the testicles, exhaustion in oil-shale compounds. There was also what Wilfrid called Urfeindschaft, the motiveless or mischievous. ‘I wanted to see,’ a Latvian youth explained, ‘how they fell… whether they squawked.’
Today, imported wholesale into the Baltic States, Russians had priority in housing, tax relief, universities. Farms, ports, factories, banks were collectivized, Russian enforced in schools, supervised by another Special Branch, Spelssluzhba. Robespierre’s wit, ‘He who trembles is guilty’, was little disputed.
Nevertheless, not all Estonians were Mussulmen, listless dokodzaga. Some were joining Bernhard’s crusade; others were Forest Brothers, sabotaging ships and railways, raiding arsenals, ambushing lorries. Quislings were knifed behind the shed, shot in the woods. Subversive cells flickered, some had vanished, betrayed by the Third Man, head of British Intelligence’s Soviet Section.
From barely legible papers I knew that Soviet deserters were amongst the Forest Brothers. At fearful Stalingrad 14,000 had been executed for attempted flight. Some might have reached Meinnenberg. I remembered the lines of Walther von der Vogelweide:
The British, resourceful, leisured, had, with sporting generosity, acclaimed the first Russian sputnik, the young imagining it as overture to a second creation, which supported a Labour politician’s foretelling as mathematical certainty the West collapsing in competition with Communism. A satirist reviled Churchill as confederate of Bomber Harris, murderer of Dresden and Berlin, Never to Be Forgotten, Never to Be Forgiven.
My own prospects were further encouraged when the First Secretary suggested I write booklets on Estonian culture and history. Here I found friendship with the librarian. Elderly, his head, yellowy and chipped as a walnut, was always slightly askew, as if badly reset after an operation ambitious though illegal, so that I was tempted to straighten it, despite likelihood of a sharp crack. Nicknamed Mr Tortoise, he had published some youthful novels, later a thesis, accepted by Tartu University, on the symbolism of black in medieval art, his argument structured on a very dark fourteenth-century Sienese painting. Subsequent cleaning, however, proved that, originally, it had been exceptionally vivid. This destroyed his competitive ardour, but he was now tireless in supplying texts, translations, long-forgotten knowledge.
The pamphlets satisfied my seniors, who then demanded I compile a more literary miscellany for distribution to North America, Scandinavia, and to be smuggled into Estonia itself. This was testing, adventurous. I was encouraged to contact genuine writers and scholars, though response from Baltic Nobel Laureates, while possible, was improbable, like addressing the Queen as ‘Babe’.
Estonia’s sole world figure, already hanged, filling few sentences, was Alfred Rosenberg, the Führer’s racial Mephisto.
Mr Tortoise quickly listed likely contributors from Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Princeton, Ottawa, and I immersed myself in novels, verse, plays, rural traditions. Oral Livonian verse seemed hinged on protecting land, roof, family and on hopes flying like gulls over the Sound, black and white upon blue and grey. I read lamentations of Tsarist conscripts, epic hunts, clan feuds, the propitiation of ancestors, the recipes of shamans. Of talking eagles, bears mating with humans – Forest Uncle on the way – elks in the sky, a star-god seducing a housewife, trees with runes, some scrawled by themselves, cow-girls outspread naked on brilliant meadows, dun landscapes patient as cattle.
Short-haired, taciturn, alien, I was most at home ranging pre-Christian Estonia and a personal, hallucinatory London, city of the scared boy-king in the Tower, Fagin and Copperfield, Holmes and Watson, all so distinct from the masses in an indifferent, international metropolis, still visibly torn by the Reichsmarschall. I would not forget St Paul’s, giant head and shoulders intact above flame and smoke. Westminster Hall, lofty, spare, testified a people upright into my own time, when others cowered, appealing to worthless treaties, pledges from cheats. But Londoners could now be stifled in what the Ambassador deplored as the New Appeasement, though maybe awaiting some call, some marvellous gesture, if not from what had been so admired in the Manor, some mannered, debonair Sir Anthony. Abbey and Palace kept elaborate façades, but power lay quiet within briefcases and where puny Estonia had no being.