Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

None of this offered me true place. Words rotted in my head. Democracy was opportunity only to test my inferiority.

Eeva. Eeva Strendermann had worked on a Russian-financed soft-porn magazine intended to distract youth from politics. Currently, she was assistant editor for a long-prohibited Social Democratic monthly. She was unemotional, practical, never fussy.

After the Human Chain festivities we met casually at a water-side eating-house, always buzzing with actors, artists, journalists. We would drink, saunter under a sky jugged with low autumn clouds, while I questioned her about Estonian affairs, until we talked ourselves into silence or boredom.

Sometimes I learnt more. Her parents disappeared under Nazi occupation, most of her friends been deported by the Russians. A few survived by translating, black-marketing, pimping, prostitution, a cousin had been killed with Forest Brothers. She herself had had a German ‘protector’ until the Pact dissolved. She could recount enormities that, from London, I had attempted vivid descriptions. The editor hanged, on accusation of printing Reval instead of Tallinn; the pastor dangled by his feet above guard dogs left unfed; the doctor handcuffed to a headless corpse. She confirmed that, unlike Red Army discipline, Wehrmacht officers could sometimes opt out of arranging or witnessing massacre…

‘I then had another. A Ukrainian.’ She was objective, the honest journalist. ‘He could be gentle. He had been trained as a Lutheran theologian.’

With early Russian defeats, she had been booked by SS Captain Jaenecke, who provided her with a hot water apparatus, gramo-phone, numerous watches and a signed guarantee of her tenancy and rations, which the returning Russians astonished her by honouring. ‘He now owns a West Berlin restaurant. I imagine very fashionable. Silks, shirt-fronts, swagger-coats. Herr Marco Millions!’

She looked severe, as if annoyed by her own disrespect, then smiled, very independent, sea captain’s daughter. ‘Well, it’s easy to rebuke. Here we say that whoever finds herself in the tiger’s mouth will seek help even from the tiger. Yes?’

After a while we were reading newspapers together, she helping me remember the language. Iceland was first to recognize free Lithuania, by summer all three republics would be admitted to the UN. Formally concluding the Second World War, Russians were evacuating Poland. Gorbachev, fulfilling glasnost , unopposed even by the British Foreign Office, admitted Soviet guilt for the thousands of Polish officers murdered at Katyn.

No more than to myself could I convey to Eeva my exact feelings for Britain, its oddities, submerged loyalties, satirical humour. With loud generosity, intolerant outbursts, its networks and fraternities, vast silent spaces, America was less subtle. I did attempt description of my own Anglo-German complexities and Manorial reminiscences. Kitchen folk, puzzled by my withdrawals to Turret and Forest, concluded that I had been born at midnight. Years later, a Montreal child informed me that, for the same reason, Mr Mandela had been born black.

She promised to drive me through forests to Lake Peipus, where Nevsky had routed the Teutonic Knights on the ice. ‘But we must wait until summer.’ Monstrous white-and-black riders, obliterated in yelling horror. Nach dem Osten woll’n wir reiten.

One riddle, like a misspelling, she had already explained. She had called me famous. I suspected mockery or abuse of my lineage. Later, in her Lower Town backstreet room, crammed with books, magazines, a computer and lit with strident nationalist posters, she surprised me by pulling out two Estonian copies of my Secret Protocol , recently published.

Usually almost colourless, her face, with its strong bones, sea-blue eyes brightened at my reaction. ‘In those times, your talks and writings got through, were cyclostyled, distributed by what American slaves called Underground Railway. We listened to you from magic London, despite difficulty.’ She grimaced at the under-statement.

‘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.