Much was supposition, notably an FBI note of the Herr General’s covert meeting with the Duke of Windsor in Lisbon after the capture of Paris.
Such a man joins no White Rose or July Plot. He flickers in shadow play, a dim hand poised above ciphered missives, to demolish, dispossess, bargain, condemn; a blur, passing in an armoured car with obscure number plates.
Father, rather apologetically, once said that though the Herr General never lied; he enjoyed truth indirect. I myself was to find that, if three say identical words, two are untruthful. Mother reproached him, then, seeing me escaping to bed, murmured in very different voice, ‘Good night, my pet. Sleep with angels.’ Yet it was from the Herr General that I craved denial that the Manor, like all Big Houses, contained a scaffold, explaining business once done in the Rose Room.
Now, would-be Londoner, pamphleteer, editor, with newcomer’s zest, I was a counter-Marat, an anti-McCarthy, exposing crimes, denouncing the unclean, in territory without barriers, where the dead stalked the living. With sudden optimism, I judged that my pamphlets, and the lyrics and sub-epics of the Miscellany, would fortify the Forest Brothers.
Easily indictable was Alexander Seroff, of Soviet State Security, Moscow’s henchman in destroying the last of the Estonian intelligentsia, responsible to Khrushchev.
My mail swelled, mostly supportive, though one scrawl complained that I was a lackey of General Motors, another that, as a gentile, I would never see God, a third denouncing me as a police spy.
I was permitted a broadcast on Independent Estonia, Mr Tortoise supplying notes on Nationel no Trudovay, National Unity Society, dissolved by the Pact. Many survivors joined the Forest Brothers, though several were communists, their loyalties equivocal.
A few sentences tapped from Estonia revealed that a former National Unity member, Georgi Okolovitch, fleeing to West Germany, had been trailed by Nikolai Khokhloff of SMERSH, the Bloodhound. At Frankfurt, confronting each other, they made friends, recklessly held press conference, then vanished.
Other reports were less highly coloured, more like muffled bleats from a submerged and wrecked submarine. A twilit scenario of dubious allegiances, currency fraud, pornography, bugged rooms and telephones, supra-national linkages. A known KGB officer sat in the Bonn government, another was a UNESCO prominente. Yet another, protégé of U. Thant, UN Secretary-General, spoke regularly on Radio Free World. CIA was tussling with KGB, to finance aspects of the World Council of Churches and the Congress of Cultural Freedom. CIA money was said to underpin Mr Spender’s influential monthly. Moscow maintained that mafiosi had secured the recent election of the young, vivid JFK, who then shared a girl with a Midwest godfather.
A Himalayan guru, revered and overpaid by Western youth, to reduce fears of the Bomb, denied the existence of Existence.
Mr Tortoise found me a photostat of a 1940 Foreign Office map of Brazil, some provinces coloured, denoting Nazi plans for occupation, in another forgery, to induce US entry into the war. Eesti Hääl accepted an appeal from Manifeste des 121 to French soldiers to desert rather than use torture in Algeria, where Estonians served as Foreign Legionaries. We designed a European chart, reducing hallowed cities to strokes, circles, initials, synonyms of pharmaceutical laboratories, armament and toxic gas fortresses, airfields disguised as colleges, real estate offices, undeveloped areas. Italicized dots co-ordinated a Belfast rifle club, Amsterdam bookshop, Milan Masonic lodge, Marseilles insurance company.
Tiny incidents I remembered from Paris were now magnified, loaded with meaning. The soft-spoken philanthropist enquiring whether Wilfrid travelled by air, a royalist’s anxiety to discover Malraux’s telephone number. Next week, ‘for kicks’, wealthy teenagers had placed a plastic bomb near his flat. ‘I can offer you perfect style,’ an elderly German had promised, ‘also, absolute protection’, mistaking my importance.
Such massed information was fatiguing, but the Miscellany revived me, presenting friendship with the unseen, some alive, others dead. Maria Under, the poet, Bernard Kangro, authority on Estonian folk traditions, sent me new work. With Mr Tortoise, I persuaded UNESCO to publish Karl Bistikvi’s Hohenstaufen Trilogy. From Oslo exile, Ivar Günthal sent extracts from his polemical journal Mana. We edited translations from Gerd Hetbemäe’s periodicals. Estonian humour became more understandable, akin to its landscapes, often bleak and sunless, then revealing subtleties: it had the sardonic slyness of the subjected, the dumb-insolence grin of Good Soldier Svejk. A moving resistance story, ‘Partisans’, arrived from Arved Viirlaid, of Toronto.
A character in a play that London had frenziedly applauded, brayed that no good causes were left. The Miscellany was now sent to the author, though without response.
Would Rilke have discerned gods in managerial England, of planning, City and parliamentary scandals, vomiting drunks and television aristocracy? But, this morning, a new Estonian poem shone like light compressed to a jewel, flashing golds and blues against London greys and vernal greens. From stories I regained old kitchen talk of learned birds, miraculous wells, trees inventing speech, the village ‘Shrewd One’ stating that no animal save the occasional bear possessed souls. For illiterates, like detectives and partisans, a bridge, footprint, low whistle had significance outside stories.
Not a poet, I planted myself in poems, with delight almost sexual chancing on Bernard Kangro’s verses.
Very tactfully, Mr Tortoise reminded me that the word soul had been the death of many poets.
In parodies of a heroic career, I was building a grandiose self: Malraux’s confidante, Trilling’s assistant, Spender’s intimate and rival editor, BBC reliable, almost a new being like Soviet Man, American Youth.
The facts dowsed such mish-mash. Midsummer was approaching, but Destiny refused an appearance. I would receive no curtain calls from posterity, was no more than prey to exile’s disease: irrational hopes and fears. Alarm at a posse of ambulances ranked opposite the Embassy, vanishing as soundlessly as it arrived. Late-night trains rushing unscheduled through post-midnight London allegedly loaded with nuclear waste. Morbid expectations dripped into dreams, telescoping the years. Rats fled Stalingrad, as, forewarned, at fire, earthquake, the voles and martens abandoned Helice, the island crushed by the sea, two millennia ago. My Midsummer Baldur, saviour and friend, princely, what Dutch called deftig, was as unlikely as Her Majesty tattooing on her thigh ‘Ban the Bomb’.