In Tallinn I was immediately affronted by the ubiquity of armed, uniformed Russians, more numerous after Polish and East German subversion. But I was more concerned with the past, not in nostalgia but from slowly reviving curiosity.
The light, hard, clear, revealed not the strangers jostling around me but a charade of relations, servants, villagers, all masked, everyone somebody else, preying on schoolboy ignorance, transformed by war and resentments.
Despite this, I could not long be unmoved by the emotions visible beneath dour Estonian stolidity, the red-banded Soviet caps above faces heavily silted, the naked bayonets. Whispers stealing through alleys, parks, foyers, bars were repeated in taxis, kiosks, under trees. Civilians exhibited dumb insolence. Forest Brothers had not failed utterly.
During that summer protest simmered, remnants of professional classes regrouped. Pastors united with White Russians, ex-soldiers, lawyers and the unidentifiable. Newspapers published accounts of Livonian Knights expelling Danes and Poles; ostensibly antiquarian, they carried analogies potentially deadly. The central arsenal admitted break-ins and thefts.
No adventurer, mere tourist, I strolled the streets, took bus to the country, explored the red slopes of Hansa Bürerhausen, contemplated a grey, slitted Livonian Tower, the fissured ramparts of Lower Town, beneath which shabbily shawled, immemorial women sold eggs, beets, cucumbers, trugs of wild mushrooms, cloudberries, whortleberries, posies circled by hay wisps. Almost somnambulist, I was lost amongst unknowns in complexities of shadow slanting from arches crumbling above narrow, twisted side streets or drifted into Upper Town, crowds perhaps less aimless than they appeared, chatting, laughing, shouting, along leafy Tartu Mante with its stalls of expensive flowers and handmade chocolates reserved for officials and foreigners; also clothes secondhand but opulent, jewels still brilliant in outmoded settings, handbags once fashionable. Despite dreamy introspection, I was aware of queues outside pawnshops, banks guarded by Russian marksmen. Footsore from cobbles, I began seeing the significance of unpainted trams, rusting cranes, the crude supervision of people when they paused for rest, sightseeing or perilous thoughts.
Superimposed were other times, a seance waved into being, not by pudding-like Alexander Nevsky Cathedral but by ancient, baronial Dromberg where sleeps Kalev, son of Taara, whose divine uncle’s tears supplied the town’s water; by rich Hanseatic domes, gables, coppery spires fretted like ringed fingers; by the baroque jumble of Toompea Castle with its traces of Catherine the Great, her cyclopean serenissimus and master-builder, Prince-Marshal Potemkin, and of her son Paul, Pahlen’s victim.
On suburban edge, waters were smeared yellow by effluent from chemical works, the banks like congealed Meinnenberg dough. Then back to the slim steeple of St Olaf’s and, yes, the Fat Men, twin towers out-topping the Russian-built tenements that changed neighbours to strangers.
Best of all, free of red armbands, grumbles, stares were the limestone cliffs, sandy beaches, bristling pines with wind in their hair, a few couples hand in hand, free sky curving over the Gulf, though to venture inland would be to meet barbed wire and Kalashnikovs.
Hotel Splendide bar was harshly lit, though electricity might abruptly cease, from power failure or something else. Party bosses and their tarts demanding rooms rented by the half-hour jostled with municipal dignitaries, political toadies, KGB minions. Far preferable was the newer Hotel Viru, dim, cosmopolitan, casual. Russians, many oriental, with close-cropped heads and thin mouths, drank and played cards with Poles, Germans, some nonchalant British and American and Swedish journalists, whores in short sparkling dresses and artificial furs.
Talk was careless, oblivious to secret listeners. I met railway supremos, metallurgists, arms touts, jobless army officers, South American uranium specialists, ferry captains, Finnish quarry surveyors, a Lithuanian oculist with a sister married ‘high up’ but now scared, senatorial pharmaceutical savants, Armenian mineralogists, Israeli novelists, Iranian royalist exiles superbly double-breasted, the usual nondescripts mysteriously subsidized, some political zealots murmuring about ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’.
More congenial were free-spending Swedes licensed, by notorious bribery, to prospect magnesium. Sinuous, soft-spoken drug purveyors intermingled with pimps, and vaguer figures, perhaps Former People, well dressed but with some dignity and humour, cadging from border-town black marketers and from youthful Soviet pilots with thick wallets, easily gulled by both sexes. The soundless advance of AIDS had scarcely reached the frontier.
A dry, acrid smell was inescapable, of cheap perfumes, skimpily soaped flesh, of ill-managed kitchens and drains, pushing me back to shore air crisp as chicory or to the grass and pools of Kadnorg Park. Here a man, chatty, with Schweizerdeutsch accent, offered to sell me lottery tickets, American cigarettes, dollars. Undeterred by refusal, as if peeling a vegetable, he handed me a list of names that ‘a gentleman of your distinction must know’. Saul Bellow, Dustin Hoffman, Salman Rushdie, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Henry Jonas, Margarita Kovalevska, whom he appeared to have successfully swindled. Intrigued by my indifference, he drove me to Kopti Harbour on the peninsula, site of wartime camps, long sheds, sinister poles, death ditches, one of scores of such boils suppurating in Eastern Europe, another reminder of Meinnenberg where, united in viciousness, starved creatures, once lawyers, editors, teachers, frantically clawed rations from the dead or dying.
Roofs were torn from the sheds, the rail track was ruined, but the watchtower remained, stark, giant, dogs nosing at smashed acetylene lamps heaped around iron struts. I wondered what was my companion’s tale, what he was telling me.
‘Plenty of future,’ he said on return, but I doubted it.
Alone again, I stared at the town hall on which a night rider had daubed Whoever Fights Is Right, Neutrals Are Losers and felt momentary self-reproach. Lenin’s statue was overthrown within sight of the Central Police Barracks; fire damaged KGB offices in a small medieval Danish fortress; three commissars were found dead under a cliff, then a trade delegate was strangled in a wood.
Defiantly neutral, I repeated Gunars Salins’ verse:
The decade was ending, rapidly, almost headlong. Despite Soviet deadweight, open hostility was heard towards the USSR, also suspicion of the European Community and its billionaire multinationals, West Germany with its full treasury and far-reaching ambitions. Illegal newspapers were scanned in the streets, watched by impassive police. From many towns, small incidents, brawls, stone-throwing, horseplay, were reported as party rallies. Despite prohibition, old festivals were being revived, others invented, excuses to flaunt national costumes, traditional dances, ballads, hymns, satirical rhymes, insulting earlier oppressors, Danes, Swedes, Germans. Long forbidden, organ recitals resumed in a packed St Nicholas’s Cathedral, the sounds of Bach and Sibelius strong as spires and columns.
The State Radio admitted crisis in the Polish shipyards, the Solidarity leader, Walesa, achieving his demands for reform. With the Bear in stumbling retreat, Church rights were restored, Solidarity legalized, a supporter was elected premier. Everywhere, applause greeted the successful anti-Communist moves of the Polish Pope, John Paul II. Hungary was extracting Kremlin permission for political parties. Prague Soviet officials were being pressurized by boos, boycotts, obscene jokes and found reserved seats and theatre boxes usurped by others, grinning insolently.