Mari Saat - The Saviour of Lasnamäe

Then she added, suddenly quiet, knowingly sneering, “I shouldn’t be talking like this… I’m not a Jew, I care little for religion…”

Sofia did not know quite what to make of that last sentence; for some reason she asked instead, “But what about the Estonians? There’s so few of them?”

“The Estonians?” said Grandma slowly, and asked, almost suspiciously, “What have you got to do with the Estonians?”

Sofia felt her face reddening – she didn’t know if it was because Grandma had realised somehow that Sofia wasn’t Estonian – did she still have a Russian accent then? Or had Rael told her? But Sofia sensed that no one had to tell Grandma anything – that she could see everything for herself when she stared intently like that – she could even see her secret…

However, Grandma did not require any more replies from her, she merely said, slowly and knowingly, “The Estonians… the little ruffians…” and sniped as if with a knife, “just look what they did to Sigtuna!”

The whole conversation drove Sofia into a state of utter confusion. But the thing that dismayed her most was that the earth might be in pain; could it be true that somewhere beneath their feet, under the tarmac, there might be a great being, immeasurably larger than an elephant or a dinosaur, who really might groan and suffer at the hand of the tiny creatures that were forever plaguing it?

“What did the Estonians do to Sigtuna?” she asked Rael on the way home.

“To what?” asked Rael.

“Sigtuna?” Sofia repeated, falteringly – she wasn’t sure whether she’d remembered the word correctly.

“Haven’t the foggiest,” Rael said, “what makes you think they did something to whatever it was?”

“Your grandma said, ‘look what the little ruffians did to Sigtuna’… That’s it, and by ‘the little ruffians’ she meant the Estonians…”

“Oh well, if that’s what Grandma said then they definitely did something dreadful to whoever it was… broke his neck… or disembowelled him, if it was a really long time ago… They disembowelled a priest once – the Estonians were no angels, you know… Grandma takes in everything she reads, and remembers anything she’s read, even if it was a hundred years ago…”

Perhaps the history teacher would know, although Sofia wasn’t sure that she’d remembered the name Sigtuna correctly – could it have been “Sigulda”? She’d heard of Sigulda – it was in Latvia…

“Do you believe everything your grandma says?” she ventured again.

“Such as?”

“Well, for example, the idea that the earth is actually alive? And that it could be transformed into desert… Made into desert by bad ideas, that bad ideas make deserts grow?”

“Ah, Grandma’s been telling you that load of old rubbish then!”

“But haven’t we just been learning about deserts growing all the time?”

“Well that’s because, because there are simply too many people… That’s why we need to irrigate and cut down the forests… You shouldn’t believe everything, you know… Anyhow, Dad says that anything might happen, it’s just as likely that a comet will smash into the earth and we’ll all be for it, but we can’t live as if that’s actually going to happen – if we’re scared of everything then we’ll never get anything done. Much better to live as well as you can, for as long as you can.”

Rael was right, of course. But if her grandma was telling the truth and everything was as she said, after all, that was how it had sounded when she’d said it, as if there were no doubt about it, in a voice that sounded like a messenger from the bosom of the earth, gloomily reporting what the earth had to say…

Sofia was suddenly overcome with distress: if it really was true, then were they and their lives so pointless, what was the purpose of her having braces so that she didn’t have to spend her life going round with crooked teeth and her mouth half-closed… What was the point of it? And yet Grandma’s story also offered some solace because if they were so pointless, then it wouldn’t really be of any import whether she became president or not, much less president of the little ruffians… There was no one in the world who was good, no good nation – even the tiny ones had inflicted harm on someone and if they hadn’t, then it was only because they hadn’t had the strength – and if there were a God in heaven… What if he really did exist? If he did, then why did he allow people to do harm to the earth? What was the earth guilty of? All it did was spin. It span on its course – why did it have to suffer? Mum’s friend Lyuda, the lovely, plump, ever-immaculate Lyuda had a dog, a small beige long-haired little dog that Lyuda always described as almost a full pedigree Pekinese. The little dog had caught fleas once and kept scratching itself and whining. “Where could he have picked them up?” Lyuda had wailed with an aggrieved expression, lips pursed and her fat soft cheeks a-wobble, and why did the poor animal have to suffer like that… Why, oh why do the innocent have to suffer?

That night in bed she couldn’t sleep – she had itches here and there as if suddenly being bitten by fleas herself. Eventually she fell into an oppressive, fitful half-sleep – it appeared to her that the earth was full of tiny people trampling its round belly and gnawing at it and whining snidely and jostling and tearing at each other, but the earth kept on spinning beneath them. It wasn’t really a dream, more of an anguished feeling, and it prevented her from nodding off… Some time later she began to feel the anguish mounting, gaining strength, and she suddenly noticed that she was not in fact asleep and that the anguish was real, audible from the adjoining room – that meant that Mum had come home without her noticing, and she was now asleep and moaning in her sleep as was usual of late… But Sofia was so horrified that she ran into her mother’s room and shook her.

“Mum, are you ill? Are you ill?”

Mum woke up with difficulty.

“Two hundred and fifty…” she murmured.

“What do you mean – two hundred and fifty?” Sofia almost screamed, and shook her mother again.

“I, I don’t know. It’s nothing…” her mother said, more clearly now.

“What’s wrong?” Sofia demanded, she felt so awful, she had the feeling that somewhere deep beneath their feet, under the building, deep in the heart of the earth something might suddenly happen, that everything might suddenly crumble to dust…

“Nothing,” said Mum, “it must just have been an incubus. An incubus might come if you sleep on your back. They throw themselves on you and try to smother you… you just have to roll over…”

“Mum, can I come in with you? I can’t sleep, I want to come in with you, there’s room for me,” begged Sofia and pushed her mum towards the wall.

“What are you doing?” her mother pushed her away. “You’re a big girl now… I’m not clean… caught something from the patient… Not OK…” but in the end when she saw Sofia sitting on the end of the bed and not going away, she said, “OK, let’s go into the kitchen, we’ll make some sugar water, tomorrow’s Sunday, we can have a lie-in in the morning…”

Sofia felt suddenly better and content. Sunday mornings were the best mornings – she could sleep and she knew that Mum wouldn’t be visiting the patient in the evening, so the strange family would have to look after him themselves… And the sugar water that she sipped was like something very clean and light that gradually, comfortingly spread through her… As if it made everything as smooth as glass…

“Mum,” she asked, “is the earth, our planet, alive?”

“I don’t know,” said Mum. She was quiet for a while – perhaps she was thinking about something else entirely – but then suddenly she added, “We Russians call the earth Matushka Zemlya, as if it were a mother to us, a good woman … So for us it’s as if it’s alive… Or is that what we say about Russia?”