Mari Saat - The Saviour of Lasnamäe

Then she’d be able to stand on her own two feet, not that there was any need for her to find a job mind you – nowadays even young people had trouble finding a job, although granted, Sofia could speak the language… but she was so – how to put it? Woolly-headed? No, that wasn’t the right word because she was doing very well at school… But she was unworldly… with such dainty long fingers and a build like a beanpole. Who’d employ someone like her, and what work would they give her? Perhaps she should try and get into a university on a scholarship so that she wouldn’t have to pay. A student loan would be dreadful. It would hang over her for half her life. A loan of any kind was an awful thing… Things were better in the olden days. You couldn’t get loans – there was no temptation to because there was no opportunity. And you could always get work, you could always get some kind of work, you didn’t have to suck up to the boss. If the boss yelled at you, you could yell back, but nowadays no one ever dared raise their voice. Granted, there had been nothing in the shops to buy, but people still had food to eat and no one was turfed out of their flat… If, of course, they’d been lucky enough to have one – there was no chance of a flat for people working in kindergartens… but no one had had to beg either. Just try talking about it when Sofia was in earshot though, she would not hear anything of it, she would get so irate. She only goes and defends the Estonians! It’s because she speaks Estonian so well and reads Estonian books… the Estonians think that they destroyed the Union. And there are even some Russians who agree with them, they think that the eternal Estonian fascists destroyed the Union, when in fact of course the Union broke apart all by itself. Last time Natalya went to visit her family, when her mother was still alive, deep in the Soviet time, when Gorby was still fighting vodka and the trip was straightforward, there was no need for visas or anything, and her uncle had told her, “The Union’s breaking up, you must have noticed. The trains are no longer running to time, if they run at all that is; the coaches have disappeared, whole trains have gone missing, you must have noticed. Once the railway stops running properly, the country will follow soon enough, it’s like the thaw, it’s unstoppable.” Her uncle knew about these things, he was a third-generation railway worker, his own father had seen the tsar leave… So Estonians or no Estonians, the Union would have broken up in any case. Any peck that tiny Estonia landed on mighty Russia would go unremarked, though sure enough, once it was riven with cracks, a teensy tap would be all that was needed to smash the whole thing apart…

Once Sofia was able to stand on her own two feet then Natalya would be able to get by, perhaps as a childminder… She’d have earned much less as a childminder, no more than the minimum wage, and she’d be on the go all day. Shift work was better; sometimes you just needed some time in the day or a morning to do things in town… Like going to the doctor’s…

She’d barely gone to the doctor’s at all during independence, and never for herself, just occasionally for the child. In fact her daughter had managed to make her own way there but now there were so many places that asked for money, lots of money, and she wasn’t keen to give it to her. Sofia was so lackadaisical about money; she’d put it in her pocket and it would fall out with her hanky… Or if she put the money in her bag she’d leave the bag on a counter somewhere. She was sharp though… There were no Bs in her school reports and she read Estonian freely, and English too. Every Friday and Saturday evening she would sit in front of the TV half the night and listen to the dreadful thud-thud-thud and interviews with the musicians responsible for the din, but it wasn’t all bad. She learnt English that way, and that was something that she definitely needed in life, perhaps even more than Estonian. No, definitely more. Besides, she wasn’t bothered about partying in the evenings.

Natalya Filippovna was pleased when Sofia invited her friends home, and what’s more they didn’t turn the TV up too loud either. If they had done, the neighbours would have come and complained. With earplugs in she could sleep. Natalya Filippovna had learned to sleep whatever the circumstances – in full daylight or amid noise. It was essential with the shifts at work when you had to be just as quick and accurate at night as during the day… Finally, the most important thing was for the children to be at home indoors, not mooching about goodness knows where.

That Thursday Natalya Filippovna and Sofia went to the doctor’s. Sofia had to miss school because of it of course, because the only free appointment that the doctor had was that morning, otherwise they’d have had to wait another month, but the appointment was important. Natalya Filippovna had been told that this doctor was the cleverest doctor in the whole of Estonia, or at least in Tallinn, and what this one didn’t know, no one did.

As a matter of fact there was nothing wrong with Sofia at all. She was a completely healthy child. Oh, she often had a cold or a sore throat or fever, but these things passed. Otherwise she was as fit as a fiddle. It’s just that her teeth were a bit crooked. Well, not crooked, just a bit too close together – one of her incisors was slightly, but barely noticeably, in front of her other teeth. Natalya Filippovna even thought it endearing, as if one of the front teeth were planning to push in front of the others but was in two minds about it… But it wasn’t even so much as a blemish. All right, perhaps if she’d wanted to be a model, and she was cut out for it right enough – she was already taller than Natalya Filippovna and as slender as a whip with her long, wheat-coloured hair… Just like her father: tall and slender, just as compact, and an oval face like his too – that’s why there wasn’t much room for her teeth. It really was no more than a blemish. She didn’t think anyone would have cared in Russia, Moscow or Saint Petersburg, but here children were sent to the doctor’s, here all the kids went round with braces on their teeth… Natalya Filippovna had left it late: the braces should have been fitted when Sofia was seven or eight but that was just when the Union was collapsing, Estonia’s money was diverted to other things and Natalya Filippovna had lost her job – her job as a crane operator. If she were still a tower crane operator, she’d be drowning in money now and have no worries about work at all. But she couldn’t cope with tower cranes — being so high up made her feel sick, and no one had any need for ordinary crane operators any more… It had been such a huge worry that she’d simply forgotten about the braces, and besides Natalya didn’t see Sofia’s teeth as an emergency. They’d been reminded about it during a school dental check-up, but no one would treat Sofia now; they said her case was too complicated, told her to close her mouth, and that was that. When during the flu season, her front tooth that hid shyly behind the incisor began to hurt, Natalya Filippovna became seriously worried: what would happen if the barely visible but completely healthy tooth were to fall out? How would her daughter set out in life? False teeth in such a young girl? They could crown it of course. Natalya had a crown with a bridge herself; it had cost her a fortune mind, even though it had been done in the Soviet times. They would also have to file down another tooth so they could fit the bridge. What a horrendous thing for such a young child… The doctor did nothing about the tooth though; he just prescribed some tablets and some gel to massage into the gums and wrote a referral to another doctor who could give advice on dental matters – who could even apparently cure periodontitis and knew everything there was to know about teeth. He said that if there was any further delay then she would definitely lose the incisor…

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