Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

Just before dawn, twenty green-canvas-topped trucks, spewing smoky exhaust, rumbled into Tallinn’s big Mustamäe apartment complex. The polluted yellowing concrete slabs of the ten-story apartment blocks were pricked here and there by dim lights as workers from the night shifts in the shipyards and factories arrived home, eager for breakfast after the grueling twelve-hour shifts. Other workers, many of them clerical, leaving the apartment block for work were stopped by the ring of MPO troops and asked for their work permit as well as their resident identification cards. After this, they were told to form four ranks stretching from the wide, grassy strips between the apartment buildings to the curbside, where the drivers of the yellow buses were told to keep going past the stops.

More MPO naval-uniformed troops fanned out quickly into the apartment buildings, stationing themselves by elevators and fire escape stairs, forbidding any movement from floor to floor as well as from the buildings themselves.

Malkov explained to his subordinates that he had chosen the Mustamäe because the “high density” was much more manageable from a military and psychological point of view than the sprawling shipyards. Even so, Malkov stressed that it was important that the inhabitants of the complex be unable to communicate among themselves within the apartments.

In apartment 703, in number one complex, closest to the road, a middle-aged and attractive grandmother, Malle Jaakson, her only concession to age a pair of glasses, looked down at more troops arriving. Her fifteen-year-old grandson, Edouard Jaakson, excited by the sight of the troops pouring out of the trucks around the buildings, asked, “Nana — what are they doing?”

When the youth turned and saw his grandmother’s face, his boyish thrill gave way to a more mature realization — that the troops could only mean trouble.

He had grown up being taught about the Russians — their language, their history — but as well as the official syllabus, he had also heard the underground story of the “betrayal” of 1939 and the purges in 1941, after more than nine thousand teachers, intellectuals, journalists, and other “counterrevolutionaries” had been rounded up on the terrible night of June 13—family members literally torn from each other, dragged from city and farm alike to the railheads and then to the Soviet oblivion east of the Urals.

Then the Nazis had taken their share of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, with more than forty thousand Estonians forced to join the Wermacht. By the time the two totalitarians had finished their titanic war, a third of all Estonians were dead.

Now, seeing more trucks arriving, the fifteen-year-old was reminded of something else, passed down from generation to generation of Estonians — that as terrible as the Nazis had been, it was the KGB who had inspired the most fear, who had been the most barbaric.

For Malle Jaakson, clutching the boy tightly to her side, it was as if Estonia’s nightmarish history had suddenly leapt from the past to terrify the children of those who had already suffered so abominably. Edouard’s mother and father had not yet returned home from the shipyards. The first thing she must do was to warn them. She went to the phone to dial the Tallinn docks. She would keep calm, tell the floor foreman that it was urgent family business. A sudden illness.

The phone was dead. Perhaps, she thought, it was only their phone malfunctioning. Or cut off.

“Edouard, wait here. I’m going next door.” She started to turn the handle.

“ Vernut‘sya v kvartiru!” — “Back in your apartment!” The soldier’s voice made her jump in fright and she quickly obeyed.

Inside, she closed the door, leaning back on it, one hand beneath her throat as if she had trouble breathing.

“It’s a conscript roundup,” she told Edouard, her voice shaking.

“I won’t leave you, Nana. I’ll look after—”

“No, you must hide.” She held him close to her again and could feel his heart beating — but he was still a boy, despite his bravery.

“I’ll be all right,” he tried to assure her. “I’m too young for the—”

“No one’s too young for them,” she said. “No one. You must—”

She heard a metallic tapping noise and guessed it must be the sound of the troops’ metal-tipped boots as they ran into the building. She could see them disappearing into the various buildings of the complex like ants sucked up by some great anthill. Edouard broke from her tight embrace, looking down at her. “It’s the heating vent, Nana. Somebody’s tapping.”

“What?”

“The heating vent.”

“Yes,” said Malle. How often her son had complained about a late party from the floor below, its sounds vibrating up the shaft. “Yes,” Malle said hopefully. “Quickly — go and listen. I’ll watch the door.”

On all fours, Edouard put his ear close to the vent and waited. The tapping began again.

“Who is it?” he asked, careful not to give his own name first.

“Friida,” came the tinny reply. “Friida Magi. The apartment above you. Friida — you remember?”

“Yes, of course,” replied Edouard, only now giving his name, recognizing her voice, though now it was little more man a hoarse whisper.

“They are arresting people.”

“Who?” asked Malle, who had come in quickly from the kitchen, nervously casting one eye toward the door, its safety chain on.

“The KGB!” came the incredulous reply.

“No,” said Malle. “Who are they arresting? What for?”

“God knows. But you must try—” There were echoes of loud knocking coming down the shaft. The warning voice ended abruptly, the heating vent clanging shut.

“Edouard—” began Malle in a panic, but not knowing what to tell him.

“Nana! The cover in the bedroom. The plumber’s crawl space.”

“Yes,” she said hurriedly. “Good boy. Quickly, Edouard. Quickly!”

He turned, his excitement vanished now, her panic his. She saw it in his face and forced herself to calm down, steering him to the bathroom. “Go to the toilet first.”

Suddenly he had a vision of him being hidden away for days, weeks, and became even more frightened so that for a few seconds he just stood there over the toilet bowl, unable to do anything.

“Hurry!” she urged.

As he flushed and hurried to his parents’ bedroom, she thrust a small jam jar of apple juice and a wedge of cheese into his hands. He was crying.

They could hear the sound of heavy boots thumping along the hallway. “Quickly!” she whispered, kissing him. In one sweeping movement, surprising in its litheness for a woman in her fifties, she snatched a small vase of dried flowers and its crocheted doily from the main bedroom’s low night table. Next she took from it an ashtray full of coins, a comb, the family Bible belonging to her daughter-in-law, and a pair of whitish rubber earplugs sometimes used by her son at the docks. In another second Edouard was stepping on the night table, Malle steadying it on the bed, trying to push up at the plumber’s trap door. He couldn’t reach it. Malle quickly handed him one of her slippers. This gave Edouard the extra reach to shift the trapdoor just enough for a hand hold. She gave him a leg up and he was up inside, replacing the square plasterboard tile.

The sound of boots outside ceased, but now the voices of soldiers moving from door to door could be heard, and voices coming up the heating vent from the apartment below, terrifyingly close so that to Malle, the very air seemed drenched with the stench of fear.

She relaid the night table, careful not to make it too neat, then suddenly saw the dusty imprints of the table’s legs on the bed cover where she had lifted it for Edouard to stand on. She brushed it with her hand, but the dirt from one of the legs was too ingrained. She stripped the bed of the cover, threw it in the wicker laundry basket in the corner of the bedroom, and rummaged frantically in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe for the still-unused cover she’d given her daughter-in-law as a wedding present: a colorful patchwork quilt made by relatives of her father in America.