Unweeded, uncut, the garden was overweight, as though she had taken its evanescent marvels with her. I found, in one of her abandoned notebooks, By all the favours enjoyed by mortals, the gods are stirred to jealousy and vengeance.
People come, stay a while, depart. The twitch of a curtain. They love, yawn, are unfathomable. A brief exchange with a stranger can provide more understanding than the Haylocks’ lifelong marriage. Dick sees Daisy as beak and feathers; she regards him as the gentleman who mistakes the road. Knowledge too often, yet enticingly, hinges on perhaps.
Nadja had once remarked that our true intimates are amongst the dead. Everything, she added, has its time, then the mandate of heaven is withdrawn.
My lack of resentment dismayed me. I could find no treachery in the pale face under dark, floppy hair, the eyes and mouth more changeable than weather and the infinite strategies of bed. We would achieve final intimacy, though by revisions, speculations, sudden convictions from the other side of the air.
In too many lurks fear of safety, sometimes a desire to be hanged. In the Turret I had been startled by reading that during the French Revolution people had denounced not only friends and relatives but themselves, begging for Sainte Guillotine.
All was provisional, ending with semi-colons. The garden was dying, life a matter of loose ends, horribly tangled.
I sold the house, sidled away without farewells or plans, travelling through dim towns with standardized hotels, identical cafés, and crossed meaningless frontiers. People were faceless, cinemas blank screens. Weeks had the sameness in which Nadja consigned all Vivaldi. Women were bundles of lard. With everything featureless, I had sunk to an underworld, which remote forebears called Nifelheim, third realm of the dead, permafrosted, with walls achingly high, gates frozen, in neither night nor day but unbroken dusk in which to scratch at remorse, imperception, lost chances. Losing curiosity, I had no purpose. Suffering, a few maintained, completes the soul. I did not find this so.
In such impasse I shrank from slinking to England as another asylum seeker. My imagination remained pictorial, haunted by a Goya, in which a midnight hand rises from a tomb to write Nothing on a stone cross. To jump from a train, volunteer for the Congo, would be no escape from fears of street corners, sooty tunnels leading backwards. In all beds, thin sleep, if it came, was perforated with sights of blocked stairways, streets filled with nettles and fallen masonry under a cracked dome. Here I hurried in panic through fog, past unnamed tube stations, or was trapped in traffic jam, desperate for a house I would never reach, where Mr and Mrs H.G. Wells awaited me for dinner. In this realm suburban mediums groaned disaster, a French rationalist saw the Flying Dutchman. Hallucinations were superimposed on each other like geological plates, which only sha could demolish.
Shying from clarity, I dropped the explicit and sensible on the cutting-room floor. What had remained only distressed: Nadja, wide-eyed at the broken mirror, fondling a girl at the Stockholm party, was slipped into an album with Suzie, head back and laughing, with Wilfrid in his fez. Also, a wayward light abruptly revealing a face at a high, obscure window, Stalin watching Bukharin’s trial, with perhaps in his pocket the accused’s last note, ‘Korba, why do I have to die?’ Ribbentrop’s collar tightening. Chinese horror in a Malraux novel. McCarthy accusing Einstein of plotting a Red coup. Six children at play, summoned by their parents, Magda and Josef Goebbels, for a drink, the poison already tested on the Gutter King’s dog. Hess, life-sentenced, endlessly studying the moon.
With life a bauble, losing itself on a dingy street, I was fated to a ramshackle future, humiliated that music, art, literature cured nothing unless, in some manner, shared. Only the immensity of sea and sky occasionally restored precarious balance, brief as Lapland winter light.
Despair is seldom absolute. Like Andersen’s Girl Who Trod on the Loaf, sunk into marsh, though my thoughts remained heavy as sky before snow. I painfully, almost reluctantly, realized possibilities of rescue. Divided by the Wall, death’s afterthought, Europe was sending lighthouse flashes. Gorbachev was seeking peace from Armenia, racked by nationalist unrest. Polish shipbuilders were on strike, defying its illegality. Ageing student leaders reverted to comfort and incomes, but new fronts were opening, new promises, new gadgets, and in many lands sounded I should be so lucky. On some featureless street I signed a mass petition for Mr Mandela’s release, though would have done likewise for Purer Milk, a Map of Human Genes, a birthday tribute to Miss Kylie Minogue.
In my grim spell of decline, a story of Father’s gleamed through murk. He is in the library, hesitantly describing an ancestor, betrayed and defeated, dragged before his conqueror who, like the Duce and the March on Rome, arrived only when all was over. He did not cringe but smiled, very calm, his voice distinct as a blade. ‘Sir, I have almost nothing. My lands, my people, are yours. But before you kill me I will use my one possession left. I bestow on you, which all these listening will hear, remember and pass to others. By this, and by this alone, you will be remembered for ever. Albrecht the Coward.’ Father is almost intimate. ‘And, in German history, Albrecht still stands, his one distinction intact. Immortality wrapped in a nickname.’
Momentarily, the story hurt, recalling Nadja’s mention of her homeland gypsies having three names: tribal, legal and a third, to deceive demons, known only to the mother. What was her own secret name? And my own? Where was our immortality?
Whatever her nature, her sadness, she was, in some manner, steadfast. Wish her well.
That winter was the inquisitor, denying witnesses for the accused, preparing judgement and sentence without appeal. The cold poached on bones. Unwell, I had to ponder the options.
Drawn by a particular odour, by blind instinct, genetic compulsion, an animal may return over long distances to ancestral territory. With the ice chip still lodged within me, I boarded train for Riga, thence, after rough wordy passport dispute, to Tallinn, capital of a small crumpled province of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Coned towers, dull Gothic Hansa strongholds, spires wedged into thick, pale-yellow sky, red roofs, swaying trees. A troubled city, verging on catastrophe. One-third of Estonia’s population had vanished, from gauleiter and commissar. The rifle butt on the head, overwork for roads, mines, hydroelectric plants, death in canals. Natives were replaced by Russians, supervising bureaucracy, education, ports, mills, rural communes, timber, People’s Banks, macro-politics, steel, Kehra paper manufacturing, also transport and security police. Jerked by Moscow strings, the government, though intolerant, was clumsily corrupt. Gorbachev had confirmed the validity of the 1940 referendum, when 99.9 per cent had demanded incorporation into the Soviet Union, the figure announced by Moscow’s Tass correspondent some hours before the count’s completion. The clause in the 1936 Soviet Constitution permitting secession was long annulled.
Nevertheless, by 1989, bicentenary of the French Revolution, Baltic communist chiefs, amongst them the Estonian Edgar Savisar, hitherto a Kremlin lackey, were displaying covert sympathy or connivance towards nationalist demands for autonomy. The masses were stirring. A derailment, dockers’ unrest, a sabotaged machine, a march, broken by police but who, for the first time, deliberately shot harmlessly over the crowd’s heads. Military indiscipline was officially admitted. An underground press was tracked down, only after it reported biological mutations likely after a Russian nuclear explosion, hitherto kept undisclosed. A massive nationalist demonstration masqueraded as celebration of the 1943 Red Army victory at Orel. Recent Soviet repressions in Riga and Vilnius weakened the party-political structure throughout the Baltic. Gorbachev announced the innocence of thousands executed in Stalin’s purges, and, visiting Moscow, the British Premier, Mr Major, unofficially received Free Baltic representatives before appearing at the Kremlin.