Mari Saat - The Saviour of Lasnamäe

For some reason the conversation made Sofia sad – both sad and uncomfortable – somehow very uncomfortable… The boys seemed to be the type to talk them all round: Tolik was nervous and jumpy, Venya was slow in comparison, yet there was nothing placid in his sluggishness, instead it was heavy somehow, and they worked together like some kind of mesmerising machine, each knowing how to complement the other… And then that thing that Tolik said – it’s like you’re free, completely free… No one had ever talked like that about getting stoned. All they’d done in school was terrify them in health education classes, but no one had given them chapter and verse like this, yet perhaps this was the most important thing about it all?

To Sofia’s right, on a little table by the window, Johnny began rattling about in the coffee box and hurried out. He always did everything in a hurry – he even yawned hurriedly. He abruptly jumped upright on to the cage bars and looked at Sofia questioningly, his nose quivering. He had a sharply pointed nose, sensitive and restive like Johnny Depp’s – like the one he had in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ; the little paws with which he clung to the cage bars were just like human hands with their little pink fingers. Not that they were really human hands; they were hands with long, sharp claws, more like Edward Scissorhands’s… And then there were his eyes, bulging in surprise… those eyes and that face that couldn’t laugh…

For some reason Sofia began to feel very sad for the rat, well, not sad so much as afraid for it. The creature was here and completely at their mercy, as it happened, they were supposed to be responsible for it but they weren’t by any stretch the kind of people it thought them to be: it trusted them, but they could be very dangerous. What would happen if someone more drunk than Sofia were suddenly to get it into their head that rats should be destroyed? She should really let it out of the cage; it had to escape. But it wouldn’t have anywhere to go, would it? It was a situation with no way out, and Sofia felt tearful because of it.

It was all stupid, this way of thinking. The reason, it appeared, was that Sofia was pretty much wasted: the rat was not in any danger from anything, no one was paying it the least attention. High time to fetch her coat from the pile of clothes in the kitchen corner and set off home. The time it took from here, at least half an hour in the cold, would be enough to sober her up. And perhaps blow away the stink of smoke too…

But Tolik and Venya and Zhanna herself had settled down at the kitchen table together with others from their class.

Tolik was knocking something up, turning a roll-up between his spidery, nervous fingers…

“Shut the door,” whispered Zhanna to Sofia, as if something very secret was going on here.

“Shut the door, yeah,” growled Venya in a low voice – that was the first time he’d spoken at all. “There won’t be enough good stuff for everyone…”

There was a telltale bittersweet scent in the kitchen.

“Doesn’t matter, seeing as she’s come in, let her have a drag too!” said Tolik brusquely – as if giving an order.

“No, I don’t want one,” said Sofia quickly, “I just came to get my coat…” and she hurried over to the pile of clothes in the kitchen corner.

“Where are you off to?” shouted Zhanna, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her towards the table. “It’s still really early! Come on, try it, it’s really groovy – it makes everything so clear. Everything is so funny. When will you get another chance?”

“I don’t want to,” objected Sofia, but she didn’t know why not – was it that she really didn’t want to or was it just because she was afraid, because she actually liked the scent and would like to try it, but was afraid because she was always so blindly cautious…

Suddenly Venya took the matter into his own hands: he forced her to sit down, her head under his arm, his fingers holding her nose, and with his other hand forced the roll-up between her lips… Sofia had never thought that she could be so enraged. At school no one had ever touched her, instead she herself had once hit Vitya on the head, well his ear and his smooth cheek, because he’d pinched Anna under her arm in what to Sofia’s mind was a completely indecent manner, and Sofia had been genuinely furious with him and had slapped him on the cheek, but later it was she who felt embarrassed about it all because Vitya had been so horrified, and he was such a fatty and sometimes he screamed like a girl… All that was now several years in the past… Vitya didn’t scream any more… But now Sofia was unexpectedly so stupefied by outrage, or rather stupefied by the rage rising inside her, that she became almost paralysed, stiff, held her breath – she felt she couldn’t breathe any more, that breathing was completely impossible… and then she collapsed as if into the soft depths of somewhere…

Then suddenly everything was so fantastically clear, and on two levels: she knew that she was lying on the floor and the others were around her and asking if she was dead or what, and Tolik was having a drag on the joint and holding it, smoking, under her nose and berating Venya – you’re an animal, you mustn’t do that to women, what if you’ve broken her neck… It was all so vivid, but so unreal, just like a vivid sharply drawn picture. But behind the picture was something completely different, a different, real yet highly shaded world and from there, as if from behind a curtain, ran a peculiar, spidery-legged, pointy-nosed green little man, tiny, barely knee-high; he ran giggling over the kitchen floor and disappeared into the wall…

Sofia began to cough and moved towards a chair.

“Look, she’s alive! She’s still alive!” everyone shouted happily.

“What did you think she was?” grumbled Tolik knowledgeably. “If anything like that happens, weed’s always a help – and it’s not a narcotic, it’s legal in Holland… It’s a medicinal herb…”

“I have to go home now,” said Sofia.

“Are you sure you’re all right to get yourself home?” asked Zhanna in concern, although actually, she looked like she would be pleased if Sofia actually left anyhow…

Sofia had no doubt whatever that she could get home on her own two feet without any mishap. But if she didn’t make it, it wouldn’t matter anyhow. Everything was so clear, still so clear. The lights in the apartment windows had mostly gone out, the buildings now stood like large boulders; the odd car swished past – with a susurration of cold air. She knew they were cars, yet they were like some kind of foreign object. She knew what they were called only by mere chance. They weren’t real.

The street lights cast sharply defined spheres of light; a few stars had punctured the dark sky and the occasional feathery speck of snow floated softly down. It was even more like a vividly drawn picture; she walked on into the picture and became part of it. How could anything happen to a plaything like this here in this play world, and even if something did happen? Even if it did, it wouldn’t be real… She didn’t know whether the little green man had been inside the picture or part of the next picture. And what was beyond it? Perhaps another picture? She began to feel afraid: if there was no reality, then was it all just one picture after another, each inside another bigger picture? So what was this? That was how it felt: it felt as if she wasn’t walking along the road, but in the air and there was nothing to grasp hold of if you fell…

But something or someone was real. Johnny Depp! The small, brown and white piebald cage-bound Johnny with his little pink fingers and sharp claws. So what if he died in a year’s time? Right now he was real simply because he didn’t know anything about not being real. Because his ignorance was reflected in his eyes. Cage-bound Johnny now felt much more real than the real Johnny Depp, he felt like the only real thing… And Sofia realised that if she managed to hold firmly on to that small, real, reality, then everything would be all right…