Without deliberate decision, still believing myself neutral, I found myself amiably conscripted by a carload of young Estonians, drunk but eager to reach the Chain. Amongst faces bricklike, clerkish, sentimental, I had my hand held tight by a drowsy girl, resigned, without much caring, to whatever might come.
Under blue, empty sky we faced a treeless horizon. Patriotic songs were everywhere, liquor and unlikely stories swapped, good cheer abounding.
‘You’ll need these shoulders. Don’t break ’em.’
This from a girl, athletic in rust-coloured corduroy, yellow scarf, sailor’s round cap; high-cheeked, pallid, with serious grey-blue eyes. Her rough speech would have drawn condescension from High Folk.
She grasped my arm. ‘I’m Eeva.’ Reluctantly, I surrendered my own name, fearing suspicion. But her eyes went shiny with incredulity, astonishment. She almost gasped. ‘But you’re famous!’
Surely some laborious native humour, but before she could explain her sturdy self-possession went shy, and she hurried into introduction to her friends. They were friendly, some grateful for my imaginary deeds, saluting my spurious repute. Puzzled, I smiled, accepting drink, little cakes. An old woman, leathery, runic, kerchiefed, paused before us and, as twilight spread and many settled down to rest, she thrilled me with words heard so often at the Manor. ‘Good night. Sleep with angels.’
All was warm and starlit. Thousands slept on grass and scrub, volunteers kept guard. Transistors awoke us with news that Russia was silent, surely awed by the Great Chain. Coffee was handed me from all sides, Eeva superintending delivery of bread. Wary yet glad of the queer respect awarded me – as if John Wayne, not quite sober, had roughed my hair and growled, ‘You’ll do!’ – I was also cautious of her. She might be informer, provocateur, drug vendor, though I doubted it.
The Moscow Central Committee was soon to abandon one-party rule and had acknowledged the independence of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. There followed what I had never expected to witness, the dissolution of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, from Tallinn to Sofia, Lübeck to Warsaw, Moscow to Prague and Bucharest, a wreckage from a second Great Wrath. In this flush of excitement I enrolled as an Estonian citizen, though still aimless, trapped, despite the fervour and rhetoric, in an impoverished scrap of the New Europe, itself united to capitalize on Russian decline and to resist American overlordship. Party ruthlessness would, I suspected, be replaced by factional turmoil, mafia cartels, in high streets of strip bars, massage parlours, skinhead knights, impoverished student prostitutes. Overgrown cemeteries, shabby cinemas, bandstands, railway stations, neglected parks, were swarming with vivacious political auctioneers, the paraphernalia of electoral partisans, and young amateurs with paintbrushes and swabs, attacking grime and rot as gaily as they had Intourist centres, the Jean-Paul Marat factory, the granite, arrogant Catherine the Great memorial, and the archives of Spetssluzhba, the regional KGB.
Parks, we were promised, would no longer be lopped, trimmed, squared for bureaucratic tidiness, shores would be cleansed of oil-shale pollution from Soviet thermal power. Dances and a concert celebrated the renaming of Tractor Street to Street Konstantin Päts. Children cleared Tartu Mante trees of ivy. Extra trams shortened queues. More slowly, but methodically, electricity, oil, shipping were being retrieved. Pending elections, Savisor widened the franchise.
Still cautious, I yearned unrealistically not for an efficient component of European Union and NATO but for restoration of the old German Free Cities, the solid, balanced culture evoked by the young Thomas Mann. This was pipedream, but much was propitious. Russian was no longer being enforced in schools and civil service. Indigenous skills were already being subsided, not only agriculture, farming, navigation but biochemistry, laser-power cybernetics, chemistry. European combines were competing to invest in vast Estonian peat reserves, pipeline joints, welds, blast furnaces.
None of this offered me true place. Words rotted in my head. Democracy was opportunity only to test my inferiority.
Eeva. Eeva Strendermann had worked on a Russian-financed soft-porn magazine intended to distract youth from politics. Currently, she was assistant editor for a long-prohibited Social Democratic monthly. She was unemotional, practical, never fussy.
After the Human Chain festivities we met casually at a water-side eating-house, always buzzing with actors, artists, journalists. We would drink, saunter under a sky jugged with low autumn clouds, while I questioned her about Estonian affairs, until we talked ourselves into silence or boredom.
Sometimes I learnt more. Her parents disappeared under Nazi occupation, most of her friends been deported by the Russians. A few survived by translating, black-marketing, pimping, prostitution, a cousin had been killed with Forest Brothers. She herself had had a German ‘protector’ until the Pact dissolved. She could recount enormities that, from London, I had attempted vivid descriptions. The editor hanged, on accusation of printing Reval instead of Tallinn; the pastor dangled by his feet above guard dogs left unfed; the doctor handcuffed to a headless corpse. She confirmed that, unlike Red Army discipline, Wehrmacht officers could sometimes opt out of arranging or witnessing massacre…
‘I then had another. A Ukrainian.’ She was objective, the honest journalist. ‘He could be gentle. He had been trained as a Lutheran theologian.’
With early Russian defeats, she had been booked by SS Captain Jaenecke, who provided her with a hot water apparatus, gramo-phone, numerous watches and a signed guarantee of her tenancy and rations, which the returning Russians astonished her by honouring. ‘He now owns a West Berlin restaurant. I imagine very fashionable. Silks, shirt-fronts, swagger-coats. Herr Marco Millions!’
She looked severe, as if annoyed by her own disrespect, then smiled, very independent, sea captain’s daughter. ‘Well, it’s easy to rebuke. Here we say that whoever finds herself in the tiger’s mouth will seek help even from the tiger. Yes?’
After a while we were reading newspapers together, she helping me remember the language. Iceland was first to recognize free Lithuania, by summer all three republics would be admitted to the UN. Formally concluding the Second World War, Russians were evacuating Poland. Gorbachev, fulfilling glasnost, unopposed even by the British Foreign Office, admitted Soviet guilt for the thousands of Polish officers murdered at Katyn.
No more than to myself could I convey to Eeva my exact feelings for Britain, its oddities, submerged loyalties, satirical humour. With loud generosity, intolerant outbursts, its networks and fraternities, vast silent spaces, America was less subtle. I did attempt description of my own Anglo-German complexities and Manorial reminiscences. Kitchen folk, puzzled by my withdrawals to Turret and Forest, concluded that I had been born at midnight. Years later, a Montreal child informed me that, for the same reason, Mr Mandela had been born black.
She promised to drive me through forests to Lake Peipus, where Nevsky had routed the Teutonic Knights on the ice. ‘But we must wait until summer.’ Monstrous white-and-black riders, obliterated in yelling horror. Nach dem Osten woll’n wir reiten.
One riddle, like a misspelling, she had already explained. She had called me famous. I suspected mockery or abuse of my lineage. Later, in her Lower Town backstreet room, crammed with books, magazines, a computer and lit with strident nationalist posters, she surprised me by pulling out two Estonian copies of my Secret Protocol, recently published.
Usually almost colourless, her face, with its strong bones, sea-blue eyes brightened at my reaction. ‘In those times, your talks and writings got through, were cyclostyled, distributed by what American slaves called Underground Railway. We listened to you from magic London, despite difficulty.’ She grimaced at the under-statement.