Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

With life a bauble, losing itself on a dingy street, I was fated to a ramshackle future, humiliated that music, art, literature cured nothing unless, in some manner, shared. Only the immensity of sea and sky occasionally restored precarious balance, brief as Lapland winter light.

Despair is seldom absolute. Like Andersen’s Girl Who Trod on the Loaf, sunk into marsh, though my thoughts remained heavy as sky before snow. I painfully, almost reluctantly, realized possibilities of rescue. Divided by the Wall, death’s afterthought, Europe was sending lighthouse flashes. Gorbachev was seeking peace from Armenia, racked by nationalist unrest. Polish shipbuilders were on strike, defying its illegality. Ageing student leaders reverted to comfort and incomes, but new fronts were opening, new promises, new gadgets, and in many lands sounded I should be so lucky . On some featureless street I signed a mass petition for Mr Mandela’s release, though would have done likewise for Purer Milk, a Map of Human Genes, a birthday tribute to Miss Kylie Minogue.

In my grim spell of decline, a story of Father’s gleamed through murk. He is in the library, hesitantly describing an ancestor, betrayed and defeated, dragged before his conqueror who, like the Duce and the March on Rome, arrived only when all was over. He did not cringe but smiled, very calm, his voice distinct as a blade. ‘Sir, I have almost nothing. My lands, my people, are yours. But before you kill me I will use my one possession left. I bestow on you, which all these listening will hear, remember and pass to others. By this, and by this alone, you will be remembered for ever. Albrecht the Coward.’ Father is almost intimate. ‘And, in German history, Albrecht still stands, his one distinction intact. Immortality wrapped in a nickname.’

Momentarily, the story hurt, recalling Nadja’s mention of her homeland gypsies having three names: tribal, legal and a third, to deceive demons, known only to the mother. What was her own secret name? And my own? Where was our immortality?

Whatever her nature, her sadness, she was, in some manner, steadfast. Wish her well.

That winter was the inquisitor, denying witnesses for the accused, preparing judgement and sentence without appeal. The cold poached on bones. Unwell, I had to ponder the options.

Drawn by a particular odour, by blind instinct, genetic compulsion, an animal may return over long distances to ancestral territory. With the ice chip still lodged within me, I boarded train for Riga, thence, after rough wordy passport dispute, to Tallinn, capital of a small crumpled province of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Coned towers, dull Gothic Hansa strongholds, spires wedged into thick, pale-yellow sky, red roofs, swaying trees. A troubled city, verging on catastrophe. One-third of Estonia’s population had vanished, from gauleiter and commissar. The rifle butt on the head, overwork for roads, mines, hydroelectric plants, death in canals. Natives were replaced by Russians, supervising bureaucracy, education, ports, mills, rural communes, timber, People’s Banks, macro-politics, steel, Kehra paper manufacturing, also transport and security police. Jerked by Moscow strings, the government, though intolerant, was clumsily corrupt. Gorbachev had confirmed the validity of the 1940 referendum, when 99.9 per cent had demanded incorporation into the Soviet Union, the figure announced by Moscow’s Tass correspondent some hours before the count’s completion. The clause in the 1936 Soviet Constitution permitting secession was long annulled.

Nevertheless, by 1989, bicentenary of the French Revolution, Baltic communist chiefs, amongst them the Estonian Edgar Savisar, hitherto a Kremlin lackey, were displaying covert sympathy or connivance towards nationalist demands for autonomy. The masses were stirring. A derailment, dockers’ unrest, a sabotaged machine, a march, broken by police but who, for the first time, deliberately shot harmlessly over the crowd’s heads. Military indiscipline was officially admitted. An underground press was tracked down, only after it reported biological mutations likely after a Russian nuclear explosion, hitherto kept undisclosed. A massive nationalist demonstration masqueraded as celebration of the 1943 Red Army victory at Orel. Recent Soviet repressions in Riga and Vilnius weakened the party-political structure throughout the Baltic. Gorbachev announced the innocence of thousands executed in Stalin’s purges, and, visiting Moscow, the British Premier, Mr Major, unofficially received Free Baltic representatives before appearing at the Kremlin.

In Tallinn I was immediately affronted by the ubiquity of armed, uniformed Russians, more numerous after Polish and East German subversion. But I was more concerned with the past, not in nostalgia but from slowly reviving curiosity.

The light, hard, clear, revealed not the strangers jostling around me but a charade of relations, servants, villagers, all masked, everyone somebody else, preying on schoolboy ignorance, transformed by war and resentments.

Despite this, I could not long be unmoved by the emotions visible beneath dour Estonian stolidity, the red-banded Soviet caps above faces heavily silted, the naked bayonets. Whispers stealing through alleys, parks, foyers, bars were repeated in taxis, kiosks, under trees. Civilians exhibited dumb insolence. Forest Brothers had not failed utterly.

During that summer protest simmered, remnants of professional classes regrouped. Pastors united with White Russians, ex-soldiers, lawyers and the unidentifiable. Newspapers published accounts of Livonian Knights expelling Danes and Poles; ostensibly antiquarian, they carried analogies potentially deadly. The central arsenal admitted break-ins and thefts.

No adventurer, mere tourist, I strolled the streets, took bus to the country, explored the red slopes of Hansa Bürerhausen, contemplated a grey, slitted Livonian Tower, the fissured ramparts of Lower Town, beneath which shabbily shawled, immemorial women sold eggs, beets, cucumbers, trugs of wild mushrooms, cloudberries, whortleberries, posies circled by hay wisps. Almost somnambulist, I was lost amongst unknowns in complexities of shadow slanting from arches crumbling above narrow, twisted side streets or drifted into Upper Town, crowds perhaps less aimless than they appeared, chatting, laughing, shouting, along leafy Tartu Mante with its stalls of expensive flowers and handmade chocolates reserved for officials and foreigners; also clothes secondhand but opulent, jewels still brilliant in outmoded settings, handbags once fashionable. Despite dreamy introspection, I was aware of queues outside pawnshops, banks guarded by Russian marksmen. Footsore from cobbles, I began seeing the significance of unpainted trams, rusting cranes, the crude supervision of people when they paused for rest, sightseeing or perilous thoughts.

Superimposed were other times, a seance waved into being, not by pudding-like Alexander Nevsky Cathedral but by ancient, baronial Dromberg where sleeps Kalev, son of Taara, whose divine uncle’s tears supplied the town’s water; by rich Hanseatic domes, gables, coppery spires fretted like ringed fingers; by the baroque jumble of Toompea Castle with its traces of Catherine the Great, her cyclopean serenissimus and master-builder, Prince-Marshal Potemkin, and of her son Paul, Pahlen’s victim.

On suburban edge, waters were smeared yellow by effluent from chemical works, the banks like congealed Meinnenberg dough. Then back to the slim steeple of St Olaf’s and, yes, the Fat Men, twin towers out-topping the Russian-built tenements that changed neighbours to strangers.

Best of all, free of red armbands, grumbles, stares were the limestone cliffs, sandy beaches, bristling pines with wind in their hair, a few couples hand in hand, free sky curving over the Gulf, though to venture inland would be to meet barbed wire and Kalashnikovs.