Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Today, imported wholesale into the Baltic States, Russians had priority in housing, tax relief, universities. Farms, ports, factories, banks were collectivized, Russian enforced in schools, supervised by another Special Branch, Spelssluzhba . Robespierre’s wit, ‘He who trembles is guilty’, was little disputed.

Nevertheless, not all Estonians were Mussulmen, listless dokodzaga . Some were joining Bernhard’s crusade; others were Forest Brothers, sabotaging ships and railways, raiding arsenals, ambushing lorries. Quislings were knifed behind the shed, shot in the woods. Subversive cells flickered, some had vanished, betrayed by the Third Man, head of British Intelligence’s Soviet Section.

From barely legible papers I knew that Soviet deserters were amongst the Forest Brothers. At fearful Stalingrad 14,000 had been executed for attempted flight. Some might have reached Meinnenberg. I remembered the lines of Walther von der Vogelweide:

The British, resourceful, leisured, had, with sporting generosity, acclaimed the first Russian sputnik , the young imagining it as overture to a second creation, which supported a Labour politician’s foretelling as mathematical certainty the West collapsing in competition with Communism. A satirist reviled Churchill as confederate of Bomber Harris, murderer of Dresden and Berlin, Never to Be Forgotten, Never to Be Forgiven.

My own prospects were further encouraged when the First Secretary suggested I write booklets on Estonian culture and history. Here I found friendship with the librarian. Elderly, his head, yellowy and chipped as a walnut, was always slightly askew, as if badly reset after an operation ambitious though illegal, so that I was tempted to straighten it, despite likelihood of a sharp crack. Nicknamed Mr Tortoise, he had published some youthful novels, later a thesis, accepted by Tartu University, on the symbolism of black in medieval art, his argument structured on a very dark fourteenth-century Sienese painting. Subsequent cleaning, however, proved that, originally, it had been exceptionally vivid. This destroyed his competitive ardour, but he was now tireless in supplying texts, translations, long-forgotten knowledge.

The pamphlets satisfied my seniors, who then demanded I compile a more literary miscellany for distribution to North America, Scandinavia, and to be smuggled into Estonia itself. This was testing, adventurous. I was encouraged to contact genuine writers and scholars, though response from Baltic Nobel Laureates, while possible, was improbable, like addressing the Queen as ‘Babe’.

Estonia’s sole world figure, already hanged, filling few sentences, was Alfred Rosenberg, the Führer’s racial Mephisto.

Mr Tortoise quickly listed likely contributors from Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Princeton, Ottawa, and I immersed myself in novels, verse, plays, rural traditions. Oral Livonian verse seemed hinged on protecting land, roof, family and on hopes flying like gulls over the Sound, black and white upon blue and grey. I read lamentations of Tsarist conscripts, epic hunts, clan feuds, the propitiation of ancestors, the recipes of shamans. Of talking eagles, bears mating with humans – Forest Uncle on the way – elks in the sky, a star-god seducing a housewife, trees with runes, some scrawled by themselves, cow-girls outspread naked on brilliant meadows, dun landscapes patient as cattle.

Short-haired, taciturn, alien, I was most at home ranging pre-Christian Estonia and a personal, hallucinatory London, city of the scared boy-king in the Tower, Fagin and Copperfield, Holmes and Watson, all so distinct from the masses in an indifferent, international metropolis, still visibly torn by the Reichsmarschall. I would not forget St Paul’s, giant head and shoulders intact above flame and smoke. Westminster Hall, lofty, spare, testified a people upright into my own time, when others cowered, appealing to worthless treaties, pledges from cheats. But Londoners could now be stifled in what the Ambassador deplored as the New Appeasement, though maybe awaiting some call, some marvellous gesture, if not from what had been so admired in the Manor, some mannered, debonair Sir Anthony. Abbey and Palace kept elaborate façades, but power lay quiet within briefcases and where puny Estonia had no being.

A foreigner’s England could be extraordinary, if theatrical. The clash of Shakespeare’s eloquent, brutal nobles and the witty repartee of their ladies were alike gritted in animal independence. Rulers had stood trial, barely credible voyages had succeeded, Churchill in his pomp been sturdily ejected, still gripping the Flag, soon to be slowly lowered over far-away lands, provoking shrugs or complex silence.

British scepticism might show superior insight, a belief that authority is justified only when creating conditions for its own abdication. Having helped salvage Europe, these perplexing people disowned their authority, rejected European leadership offered almost without bargaining, withdrawing as if from sha.

Mother had been proud of the British Empire, deceived by pageantry. Father studied but rarely mentioned it. The Herr General praised techniques by which the few manipulated the many.

Unlike Paris, London, loaded with heroic symbols, statues, memorials, titles, discouraged conceit. A junior, employed by another and unreal authority, I needed to discover London beyond plush ceremonial and sour nostalgia and was unable to forget a message from a statesman no longer recognizable by any Londoner, ‘England is either great or is nothing.’

After my paralysis in Suzie’s bedroom, we continued as if before, laughing at small incidents, talking incessantly, but I ceased manoeuvres towards her bed.

I had no rights of judgement, was myself probably a natural collaborator. Meinnenberg was evidence that, in fear, despair, hunger, behaviour is unpredictable and unprincipled. The Pact dissolved opposites in an hour; opposites might be identical. The most popular boy at school had been ostracized, overthrown, at news that his mother had died in a car crash. Why? None of us spoke of it, none of us knew, but we all united in hating him.

That photo of Suzie throbbed like torn flesh. The bald scalp, pink as Greg’s swine, exuded repellent images over the spirited, independent girl with whom I had imagined a future. Hair from collaborators had been waved as if in witches’ Sabbath. Hair from criminal camps insulated submarines, stuffed mattresses of Party whores and of M. Bousquet, merciless dandy; hair from the Gestapo guillotine at Breslau, and from those who died on the gallows towering over Taptvere Park, Tartu, stark as Leningrad’s Bronze Horseman.

We wandered shadowy places, giggled, laughed, but like children on a birthday of disappointments. She sensed change, but in silence. Rain and Seine mist quietened the boulevards. Days were smaller, colder and when, queerly defiant, she at last drew me to bed, my ardour convinced neither of us. Her play, inventiveness, climatic shudders had been learnt in other and unappetizing quarters. Our grapplings, twists, heaves were the transitory glitter of fireworks, her nakedness mere camouflage, and, despite gasps and murmurs, our deeper silence could not be dislodged.

Winter stiffened like pack ice. My joylessness was infectious. Priggish, conformist, I could give her only good manners. Reprieve would not arrive. One day she failed an appointment; we would not meet again.

Not desolate but sad, oppressed by dishonest evasions, I immured myself with Wilfrid’s books, records, wine, he himself reported by Le Soir to be in Vienna.

A curtain had fallen, removing dazzle. Paris was bleak. The girl who ran might have been fleeing some poisoned love.