Rein Raud - The Death of the Perfect Sentence

Eventually we find one of the ship’s dimly lit cafés – too dark to read, but at least the Estonian waitress can pretend that she can’t see that we have ordered nothing, and leave us to our own devices, making no claims on our scant supply of hard currency. And so our journey goes, a bit hungrily, thirstily and joylessly, but at least in the right direction. You have brought two apples with you, and you treat me to one of them. Thank you for that. An hour before arrival we take up position by the exit so as to avoid waiting in the queue for too long. The Finns don’t have to worry about that, there is a separate queue for them; they must do little more than walk past the border guard with their passports held open. Just in case, you pull the one-hundred-mark note out of your sock before we leave the café; even though our invitation says we will be looked after and our bills paid, the border guard may ask us to show some money. Just to make sure that we remember our place.

As if it were possible to forget.

Reality

Actually, the first time I went to Finland I didn’t use this boat: I took the bus through Leningrad and Vyborg and then travelled onwards along the coast. We had to get to a gathering of Finnish and Estonian poets, and the whole thing was nearly called off because Gorbachev had requisitioned the Georg Ots ferry to travel to Reykjavík and meet Ronald Reagan. But we still decided to go.

At one event there, an elderly woman asked me what I found most remarkable about Finland. She said she liked to collect peoples’ first impressions, as they gave her a fresh perspective on her homeland. I replied that it was the petrol stations. I explained that when I was a child I had Matchbox cars brought back for me from Finland, and my classmate Peeter Laurits got given loads of Lego bricks. And so we played with them, building miniature models of a reality which was absent from our own lives. Now, years later, it was strange to see the petrol stations there by the roadside, as if a wall between me and my childhood toys had crumbled, as if I had stepped across a dividing line which had been separating me from that reality.

We are met at the harbour; a thin girl asks us to put our cases in the back of a minibus and she takes us to the Hesperia. We hear Estonian spoken from both sides of the foyer, but those girls aren’t connected with our delegation: they are wearing expensive clothes and smell of top-quality perfume. When they see us they fall silent, because we bring back memories. We hurriedly take our suitcases to our rooms and put our best clothes on – the reception has already begun. We enter the hall and are separated for a while – just in case, I let you know that the buffet nearest the door is meant for the Soviet delegation and consists mainly of vodka with or without juice, whereas at the other end of the hall you will find a pretty decent selection of wines, and the nibbles are just that little bit better too.

Alex was quite happy with vodka and juice. He felt a little uncomfortable, which was probably why he’d already downed a few drinks and was a bit flushed, but that also may have been due to the crush of people. He didn’t know anyone here apart from the Lenbumprom (Leningrad Paper Industry) people, but he couldn’t be bothered to talk about work stuff – he could talk about that to his heart’s content back home in Leningrad. He’d managed to exchange pleasantries with a couple of young Finns, but the conversations hadn’t lasted long as chit-chat wasn’t his strong point.

I’ll have a plateful of food, a drink or two, and then I’ll go to my room, he thought – tomorrow is another day, after all.

Standing in front of him in the queue was a jovial-looking older gentleman wearing spectacles who seemed to know exactly which of the snacks to take and which to leave alone, while for Alex they all remained something of a mystery. Since the man was clearly an expert, Alex decided to let himself be guided by his choices, and so he helped himself to what had probably once been some kind of sea creature, and some lumps of cheese served with pieces of an unidentifiable fruit.

The elderly gentleman took note.

“I take it this is your first time here,” he half-asked, half-stated and nodded approvingly in the direction of Alex’s plate. His English was a bit stiff, as is often the case with Finns, but that made it easier to understand. “Very good. Now all you need to do is choose the right wine. Come with me.”

Alex followed him and listened as he discussed something with the barmaid in Finnish and asked her to fill a couple of large glasses barely quarter-full of lightly sparkling white wine.

“It’s from Portugal,” the old man explained. “They know their stuff there.”

He put his glass and plate down for a moment and took a business card out of his pocket. “Tapani Yläkoski,” he read his name out. His place of work, the research department of the Bank of Finland, was also written on the card.

“Pleased to meet you,” Alex said in response. “Alex Sushchevsky.”

“Let’s keep it easy and just use first names,” Tapani suggested. “To your health!”

Alex lifted his glass. He discovered that the seafood was actually pretty good. The cheese less so.

It turned out that Tapani had been to Leningrad several times. Both of them agreed on how rapidly things had improved there recently, and they both hoped the trend could continue.

They decided to have a brandy in honour of that, although Tapani remained a little sceptical about what the future held.

“We’ve seen it before, when the Kremlin runs out of options,” he said. “In Khrushchev’s day everyone was full of high hopes too. If Gorbachev takes things too far he’ll be put back in his place, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t know,” Alex objected. “About five years back I came very close to being thrown out of university. In any case, I had already resigned myself to never being allowed abroad again. But now here I am, I’m even working in one of the new joint ventures.”

“So what did you do wrong?” Tapani asked.

“Oh, nothing, it was because of my uncle,” Alex said with a dismissive gesture. “He was a mathematician, internationally renowned and all that. Then he jumped ship, went abroad for a conference and didn’t come back.”

“Is that so?” Tapani mumbled.

“I really hated him for several years,” Alex continued. “How could he go and do something like that to us? You’ve got no idea how seriously they took that kind of thing back then.”

“I do actually,” Tapani said with a nod. “Things are definitely better now. Has your uncle been to see you since then?”

“He’s dead now,” Alex answered. “He had cancer. That’s why he stayed put in England, I guess. I understand his motivations of course. Not that the treatment would have been better there: we have first-class medical care for people of his standing, always have done. It’s just that he didn’t want to waste the last years of his life.”

“I see.”

“He left his homeland a bachelor, but he found himself a wife there in Oxford, a young one at that,” Alex said with a smile. “They travelled round the world together too.”

“Fair enough.”

“His wife even wrote to me,” Alex continued. “And the letter arrived pretty quickly too, only took ten days or so. She said I should come and visit her if I ever get to England. And I will, when the opportunity arises.”

“You know what,” Tapani said. “My daughter is a journalist, I reckon she’d be pretty interested in your story. What do you think about doing an interview tomorrow? You’ll get a small fee for it. And you can talk about your joint venture, what you’re up to and all that. What do you say?”