We have dinner at the seaside. On the other side of the restaurant’s glass front, the sky is sporting green and orange stripes. We don’t have the slightest idea how we’re going to head south tomorrow. There aren’t any trains. We’ve seen the station in Narva, as empty as a mortuary. Twenty years ago, the timetable had hundreds of departures for Warsaw, Berlin, and Prague. Today the traffic is limited to five half-empty trains: two from Moscow for Tallinn, two from Tallinn to Saint Petersburg, and one from Narva to the capital. Only east-west trains, and all of them—who knows why—in the middle of the night. During the day, only buses, but even they don’t follow the main axis of our vertical Europe. “Nobody gets off in Narva,” the ticket seller in Saint Petersburg had told us. We’re beginning to understand why.
7. MIDDLE LANDS
“I’M GOING TO TARTU, south of here. Do you want a ride?”
Alexander Adamov, forty-five, a Russian-speaking Estonian citizen, sees us struggling with the extremely complicated bus schedules posted on a bulletin board in the main square of Narva and offers us two seats in his compact car in exchange for gas money. We go for it without a second thought, and here we are riding along amid cleared fields strewn with enormous rocks, left behind by Quaternary glaciers. This is the landscape—vaguely reminiscent of Brittany, or ancient Courland, one of the many mythological regions of Central Europe—that the collision of empires and the mobility of borders have erased from the maps.
With my swollen injured foot, this comfortable car ride seems like a priceless luxury. Plus, our driver is not taking the main road but skirting the coast of Lake Peipsi, one of the most mysterious places of the North, populated by a fascinating Orthodox minority, the Old Believers. Monika has already studied them in the Caucasus, Poland, and Romanian regions of Dobruja and Bukovina. We couldn’t have asked for anything more. We Russianize our names for him with our patronymics: Monika Stanislavovna Bulaj, Pavel Petrovich Rumiz.
This is how things go when you travel light: stopovers generate encounters, and the encounters get the adventure rolling again. It works every time, even here in the green heartland of the taciturn Estonians. And so it is that between us and our providential Slavicspeaking chauffeur, a dialogue is initiated, there in the middle of those clearings, which is worth more than the reports of ten embassies on the situation on the Russo-Baltic border, one of the most delicate of the Union.
“So, how’s life going, Mr. Adamov?”
“Badly, Pavel Petrovich. There’s no work. If you don’t speak Estonian, you can’t find work.”
“But how’s that? Don’t you know Estonian?”
“All I know how to say is ‘bread.’ I don’t understand a damn thing.”
“Excuse me, but how do you ask for directions when you’re on the road?”
“Simple. I only ask Russians. Here on the frontier, we’re the majority.”
“You mean you can tell a Russian from an Estonian?”
“Sure—the Estonians’ faces are rounder, they’re better dressed, and they generally look down. And they walk differently.”
“Differently how?”
“They’re more awkward.”
“For example, that guy over there who’s hoeing his garden, what’s he?”
“Estonian. No doubt about it.”
“Shall we bet on it? I say he’s Russian. Try pulling over, and we’ll ask him something.”
From the car window, we ask in Russian for directions to a village, but the man, courteous as can be, emits a stream of loud vocalic noises that sounds like a bellowing stag. Aaai ioooo, followed by uuueeeeeooooo. Pure Finno-Ugric. We thank him and get back on our way. Adamov was right.
“Sorry, but how did you know he was Estonian? That guy didn’t have a round face.”
“Right, but he had an English lawn. We’d never keep a lawn like that. We’re more disorderly.”
“Listen, why don’t you just go ahead and learn the blessed Estonian?”
“They do everything they can to keep us from learning it. Friends of mine emigrated to England. They picked up the language in six months and now they’re working. Here that’s impossible. Why?”
“No, sorry. ‘Why’ is my question.”
“Question of money. If you take an Estonian course in Tallinn, they reimburse you 90 percent of the cost. If you take the course in Narva, they reimburse 30 percent. It’s simple. People on the frontier are discriminated against. They don’t have money to pay for the courses, so they give up.”
“And in the schools?”
“There it’s free. And in fact, there it works. My children speak the language perfectly.”
“Why don’t you protest?”
“What a question. An EU passport is worth a lot more. If you have one, it’s easier to emigrate and find work in the West.”
“Why not emigrate to Russia?”
“No, no! I was born here, and for better or worse, this is my homeland. And you don’t choose your homeland, just as you don’t choose your parents.” He tells us that the Estonians made him remove his patronymic from his identity papers. If it were up to him, his name would be Alexander Alexandreyevic, but today that’s not allowed. Use of the father’s name has been prohibited, banned, extirpated like a weed.
Be careful, I tell him. Before, you had Soviet homogenization; now you’ve got the EU brand.
On our right, we go past a sign for Sillamäet, the embarcadero for Helsinki. I have the sudden sensation of having been catapulted into the South. I look at my map. I’m nearing the midpoint of my journey.
I ask how relations are on the border.
“Terrible. Especially after the incident of the monument in Tallinn, the one to the unknown Russian soldier. They demolished it in April 2007. A disgrace. The Russians were enraged. They exhumed the bodies and took them back to Russia last summer. How could the Estonians do something like that? It’s not only an affront to the dead soldiers. It’s that history is history. What did those poor kids have to do with Stalin?”
“What’s changed since then?”
“Everything. Crossing the border is harder. It’s the worst of the three Baltic countries. Days of sitting in line to cross. Nobody has written that it’s because of that monument, but everyone knows that’s the way it is. All of Estonia is paying the price for that useless outrage.”
We pass by some sort of hotel surrounded by walls and barbed wire. “It’s a penitentiary,” Adamov explains. “The prisoners are put up in double rooms with a private bath and TV. It costs six thousand krooni per person, double the average pension. What sense does that make? Here the poor can’t afford to buy themselves a sandwich. The death penalty would make more sense.”
We stop at a bar. It’s full of well-mannered, round-faced Estonians, and the place is, obviously, silent as a tomb. A family is sitting at a table eating a quick lunch in perfect silence. I begin to understand Adamov. It’s impossible to learn a language from people who never talk.
After sixty or seventy miles, the border turns into a lake. It’s the immense Lake Peipsi, its shore lined with villages of Old Believers. They escaped here three centuries ago from the persecutions of the czar and sought refuge in the homeland of the tolerant Lutherans. Their Orthodox rigor rejected the modernization imposed by Moscow, which had massacred them for their legitimate disobedience. In their physical appearance, too, they seem like the Slavic version of the Amish, a perfect mix of Protestant rigor and Orthodox magic. Their little wooden churches conserve the ancient traditions of a religion totally separated from temporal power, and their priests are elected by the people. Monika also searched for them in the labyrinths of the Danube Delta, one of their refuges, and she is happy to find them here, too, once again in a world of water and woods. They are a people of fishermen and farmers, and their relationship with the lake is still that of the New Testament. Their vegetable gardens, loomed over by spectacular gray-blue clouds, are the most beautiful in Europe. Little gardens of Eden.