‘You sounded under waves, but we heard. You cannot guess how much we felt. You told us real news. Helping us to hold on. And some of your little books came.’
Secret Protocol was well translated, quickening stock journalism into the live and urgent. Mine, yet not mine, sometimes showing fits of grace.
On a sunny day in the Bois, which promised miracles, I had wanted to revolutionize words. Reading, I recaptured a gleam of that need, though it soon faded.
Two days later we were back in the waterside café. ‘You’re clear-eyed.’ She hesitated, as if wondering whether to touch me. Instead, without pretence of flattery, she quoted my long-ago reference to Brecht, virulent communist, stacking his profits in a Geneva bank while sneering at the Swiss workers being too happy, disinclined to rebel.
‘It means this,’ she insisted. ‘There’s a commission being got together, to revise history teaching, to tell us what really happened all those years ago. Members are tracking you down.’ She grinned, reassuring. ‘You will be wanted. Your book is already in the State Library, one of those replacing the Moscow wretchedness. That you know so many of our poets…’
We were in equilibrium, between easy diffidence and possible intimacy. She was like an air hostess, tactfully managerial, reserving some distance.
One evening, in early March, cold and windy, she was cool but convinced. ‘Before your new work starts, you should take some risk. See your Manor again. Did you not admire some text about letting the dead arise and live again?’
Objection overruled. Eeva refuted my misgivings. That slight tendency to bossiness I actually welcomed, in this and more generally. She drove me to the village, wished me fortune, departed.
I hired a bed in a cottage, virtually a cabin, the landlady a widow – the land had many widows – unsmiling, with small, round, hostile goose eyes, voice little more than a scratch. A displaced Norn. Wary, as though life was a disease afflicting most others, her responses sour as the taste of too many herrings. I did not risk giving her my real name; her incuriosity might be deceptive. Could she have been the girl who ran?
After a day’s reading, dozing, drinking in the old tavern, unrecognized, doubtless watched suspiciously, posing as a Canadian journalist, I hastened to Forest, where once, within sight of the Turret, I was lost in a thicket, stumbling in circles, pushing, plunging, fearful of starvation, Forest Uncle, a random shot, of Fenris Wolf and the Robber Girl’s knife.
I would not now find that thicket. Heimdal’s Grave had vanished, as if he had struggled free.
The village was unchanged: stained, barely resisting ivy and lichen, kitchen ranges still consumed peat, coke, pine and birch, nettles clustered on side paths, gulls still swooped over Lady Lake, home of the Marsh King and the Wild Princess. In the fields, Vlodomir cows were fewer. Crows stabbed neglected pasture. The rota was primeval, soon the mosquitoes, rooks, swifts, cranes with their whooping calls. No smashed viaduct or burnt-out staff car but the return of swallows, the cleaning of ploughs. A Moldavian poem teased, like a tune:
My room was unheated, with bed narrow as a coffin, a rough crucifix, an oval-backed chair, fluted, faintly gilded, surely stolen from the Manor. In the tavern, thick-set men sat as if marbled over mugs and pipes. Genre painting from a dull phase. Their attitude to independence was muted, accepting it as seasonal change. A dour, sardonic collection, enduring, while, through a thousand years, aliens spat and tangled for supremacy, and pastors, teachers, kvass officials thrust misinformation into indifferent ears. Their fatalism was at one with heavy soil, harsh winds, brief summers, dark woods, the inevitability of tides, beasts, the Nail of the Sky. Eeva had said that Estonians preferred Bears to Wolves, joking that under the Russians you merely died.
After a week I had not ventured the Manor, foreseeing an abandoned shell, desolate as a ghost town. After its SS captors had been shot, it became a workers’ rest home, a kolkhoz, collective, where children would have learnt that wicked people had lived there. Now, it was occasionally occupied by a new owner. Who? But it was as though I had not spoken.
I preferred to explore deeper in Forest. Though depleted at the edges, it was otherwise the same, strewn with old friends. Mushrooms – sunshades, the estate hands called them – brown boletus, stunted second-growth acacia, runic boulders, paths criss-crossing, where I once imagined the greybeard awaiting me. ‘Young man, to win your kingdom you need the strength of a bear, the resolution of a swallow and the cunning of a wolf.’
A particular ash survived, on which I had once cut my name. A protection from witches.
Everywhere I was met without open friendliness but with no rebuff. Younger men had left for the towns. Freddi and Max, Iliana and Frieda had left nothing.
Days were clearer, skies icily blue. Forest gave signs of a healthy spring. Clumps of wood anemones and wild violet, lapwings in jagged, erratic flight and melancholy cries, moles active, the ground ivy purple-blue, a faint green smudge on the trees. Buds, the sharp scuffle of hares mating, new nests, though one night snow fell, flurries of white shreds against lamplit windows. Fumes, stiffly aromatic, rank, drifted from stoves I had formerly considered of Iron Age antiquity, in an immemorial atmosphere of leather, damp, hay, linseed.
More sights. Blueberries on a mottled green plate, grey blubber of cloud above the Sound, the blur of an island, with its games, picnics, little assignments. A branch, still bare, slender as a young leg bent at the knee.
Only after ten such days I risked the road where the girl had run, carriages, motors, riders had passed, for hunts, balls, tennis, long dinners. The sky was cloudless, the sun warm, elderberries were in tiny leaf, the willows unfolding silver.
The Manor was at once substance and illusion, like a movie seen again after many years, encrusted with lush memories, rare poignancies, sharp disillusions from the fates, often distressing, of stars that had lost the world’s love.
The tall, intricately embossed gates must have been commandeered for scrap metal. From isolated pillars, the weed-lumbered drive curved towards the old mansion. The Turret was cracked and scaffolded, everywhere white plaster was discoloured, blistered, fallen; some chimneys were missing. Fruit bushes, still dewy, were being throttled by dock and thistle that had already overwhelmed the lawns. Most of the orchard had gone, two donkeys motionless between haggard stumps and fallen branches. Limes glimmered. All was desultory, silent, though smoke hovered above west gables, a reminder of the kitchen and talk of golden ones who move by moonlight.
Desisting from further search, I yet did not return to Tallinn. Days headed faster towards spring. Walking long distances, around ploughed fields, through budding groves, I must be ringed by village gossip. Tongues lived wildly, someone must soon recognize me, though perhaps pleasantly, forgivingly. Dour as pumice, skin dry and featureless as uncooked haddock, my landlady had several times released a smile, as if from a trap, and was now offering coffee, hot though brackenish, fit, she assured me, for a lord and his swans.
Traipsing back to the Manor, I again lingered at the pillars, aged sentinels, contemplating under a red, heavy sun the dishevelled gardens, the scrawled brushwork of smoke. Elegy for a lost life. All seemed diminished, more fragile: gables, roofs, mansards, timbered arches, portico, parterre.