Rein Raud - The Death of the Perfect Sentence

But no. Ervin stayed quiet, in an exemplary fashion.

He still does.

I remember one time back in 1988 (or was it 1989?): I was reading some information about the freedom movement on the wall by the Pegasus café when I came across the name of a man I had once fleetingly encountered a dozen or so years previously, back at middle school, when I took an interest in Esperanto. Let’s say this was him: clean-shaven but with a thick head of hair, chubby, his cheeks always rosy, which gave him a rather comical and utterly benign appearance – like the funny friend of the protagonist in romantic films, or the sad clown in the circus.

In the end he didn’t quite succeed in becoming a politician.

And he is dead now, as I discovered when I tried to track him down.

His name was Valev. He was soft-spoken by nature, but when he got worked up he had the habit of waving his arms about without even noticing he was doing so. He never gave out his own number; he would always phone you.

There were two of them walking along, one of them taller, with broad shoulders and a chin which jutted determinedly forward, he was walking a bit slower. The other was older, shorter, but more edgy and animated, evidently his companion’s mentor, the one who was in charge. They walked back and forth along the road between the Victory Square underpass and St Charles’ Church, making sure that no one was watching in front or behind. Raim was speaking while Valev listened with a worried expression on his face.

“It’s a real drag, that’s for sure,” Valev said, casting a quick glance over his shoulder, “and I hope that Karl bears up. It’s going to be really tough for him. I’m afraid that if they don’t let him go after a couple of days that means that they’re getting properly stuck into him. They’re particularly brutal at the moment.”

A passer-by looked in their direction and Valev fell silent for a moment.

“Because we’ve actually won already, you know,” he said. “I found out – don’t ask how – that an order was sent from Moscow, from the head of the KGB himself, telling them to work out a plan for going underground. Including cover stories for their own people and contact points for transferring funds in the future. And of course a network for blackmail operations.”

“Aha,” said Raim.

“That means two things,” Valev said. His voice almost became a whisper, and his cheeks started to flush. “Firstly, that we’ll get our country back, sooner or later. That’s certain. No doubt about it any more. But secondly, because there is a secondly as well… if their plan succeeds, we might end up with a maggoty apple. You understand what I mean, an apple full of maggots.” Raim thought he could see Valev trying to trace the shape of an apple in the air. “A maggoty apple.” Then his arms fell limply on either side of him, he cleared his throat and recovered his voice: “That is if we don’t do anything to stop it.”

“So what can we do?” Raim asked.

Valev started to explain. He looked around again and then took an object wrapped in yesterday’s paper from inside his coat.

It was a miniature camera, originally invented by one Walter Zapp, an engineer of Baltic German extraction who had lived in Tallinn’s Nõmme district in 1936 before moving to Riga. Now known as the Minox EC, it had been significantly improved in the intervening years, was being manufactured in Germany, and had earned renown as the world’s smallest photographic device, capable nevertheless of producing very high-resolution pictures.

And he also had a name to give Raim. Someone who had been stirred from the silence of the shadows: Gromova.

But now, dear reader, something more pleasant awaits us: let us leave behind this weary land for a while.

This journey is not an easy one, but it is not the first time that we embark on it, and we even have foreign passports for the purpose, kept in a safe place at home. A few years ago the authorities took them away from anyone who had travelled overseas as soon as they got home, with the exception of a few especially trustworthy persons. But in recent times it is no longer so rare for people like us to have our passports in our possession all the time. We have also managed to get hold of multiple-entry Finnish visas, arranged by our old acquaintances from the Friedebert Tuglas Society in Helsinki who have been visiting Estonia for years now, bringing with them coffee, books and tights, together with anything else necessary for a dignified existence. We have known them since we were teenagers, and have practised the Finnish we learned from television with them. The last time we were in Finland we even stayed with them in Espoo, feeling a little embarrassed that we arrived from the event we were at quite late and a little tipsy, although we managed not to wake up their grandchildren.

Fortunately things are a little different this time. We even have our own hotel rooms, and not just in any old hotel, but in the Hesperia (now a Crowne Plaza hotel). We have got ourselves on the guest list for a celebratory reception put on by a Soviet-Finnish joint venture, recently set up with the aim of using Finnish equipment to produce paper for the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union has no paper. That is, there is enough for the newspapers, but books sometimes have to wait years to be printed. Although not for much longer, if one is to believe the documents which both parties signed ceremoniously today.

We don’t see that happening because the signing event is only meant for the delegates, but we will still get into the party in the evening. Don’t worry, we have an official invitation, arranged for us by the same Friedebert Tuglas Society. Because if there is paper, then books can be published, and that is something which writers will want to celebrate, to say nothing of their readers.

So as the agreement between Director of Karelia Trade Yrjö Paananen and Soviet Minister for Forestry and Timber Mikhail Ivanovich Bussygin, which makes the factory possible, is signed in the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki, and the first chink of champagne glasses rings out, we are still waiting in the customs queue in Tallinn harbour, which is particularly slow today. But it always seems that way. You try to look calm, and you pull it off pretty well, or at least I suspect nothing, but of course you can’t fool the customs official. I only have my possessions yanked out of my bags, but you have your pockets searched as well. Thankfully the one-hundred-mark note you got from your cousin is hidden in your sock, and the customs official eventually resigns himself to finding nothing, deciding that the edginess he read on your face was just because of the irksome experience you were being put through, which was of course quite possible. Tomorrow you will take that one-hundred-mark note to the electronics shop on Iso Roobertinkatu Street and use it to buy a “Tallinn kit”, which costs forty-two marks and contains a couple of tiny components that your cousin can use to make his new TV set show Finnish television with colour and sound. The same thing would cost several times more on the black market in Tallinn, so your cousin is happy to let you keep the change, but you promise that you will treat him to a glass of the whisky which an acquaintance is going to give you to take home. Anyway, we’re now safely up the ramp and on board the ship, which is named after the Estonian singer Georg Ots. We walk about, looking enviously at the Finns and those few Estonians who have bought themselves a beer at the bar. We have alcohol with us as well, but we are taking it to our acquaintances in Finland. Some of the Finns anyway look like they no longer have much need for the bar: they’re barely able to stand upright as it is. One of them is making no attempt to hide his interest in the girls in fancy white blouses and denim skirts as they walk past.