Rein Raud - The Death of the Perfect Sentence

“I’d be happy to,” said Alex. A lamp flashed somewhere in the furthermost recesses of his mind, but he turned it off straight away. What was the big deal? So they agreed they would meet outside Kappeli restaurant the following day, and then they ordered another couple of brandies. Not exactly Akhtamar, but it wasn’t bad at all.

Alex looked at the Finnish woman sitting opposite him and found himself thinking that she was actually quite attractive, even pretty in her prim Nordic way (if it weren’t for the ugly glasses she was wearing), but she looked so awfully naïve, like everyone else from the other side of the Iron Curtain. How could she expect that centuries of tradition, and the fears which had fed them, would disappear overnight, as if brushed aside with the edge of a palm, or that spines which were so used to stooping before their superiors would suddenly straighten and that peoples’ heads would turn out to be full of freethinking ideas? Only a few people were capable of changing like that, and it did not come naturally even to them. It was obvious that one had to proceed gradually and cautiously, without upsetting anything, without causing harm to anyone. How could she not understand that people who defended and kept this supposedly evil system artificially alive were not born evil themselves, but were, as far as they and others believed, living to perform their duty, doing their best for the good of society. They’d ended up in a dead end, of course, but people had now started to appear who could lead them out – out of the planned economy, out of Afghanistan, out of the single-party state with no rule of law. That was exactly what was happening, and the pace was head-spinningly fast for some. How could she not realise that?

Silja looked at the Russian sitting opposite her and found herself thinking that he was actually quite attractive, even handsome, in his rough-and-ready Russian way (if it weren’t for the ugly tie he was wearing), but he looked so awfully naïve, like everyone else from the other side of the Iron Curtain. How could he believe that it was possible to reform the system from within when it was so ineffective, so completely corrupt, built on irrational and inhumane principles from the very start? To introduce freedoms into peoples’ lives, and require that they exercise them responsibly, while the fundamental things remained unchanged. It just wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible to be a little bit free, just like you couldn’t be a little bit pregnant, and you couldn’t take flight with just one wing. Because something would always get in your way: either the realisation that you have to throw off every last one of your chains to really be free, or a painful knock and loss of consciousness after colliding with the brick wall of reality. How could he not realise that?

“Thanks for the interesting conversation,” Silja said, taking an envelope out of her handbag and sliding it across the table towards Alex.

“Thank you, I enjoyed it very much too,” Alex replied, shoving the envelope into his breast pocket.

Indrek spotted the girls approaching. It was evening, one of those long, sunny, early summer evenings when there was almost no one in town, and no sound other than the harsh grating of the trams as they passed by from time to time. And the occasional car. He saw the girls coming from a distance, so he had some time to observe them. It can sometimes be that the main defining feature of a person, especially a girl, is immediately apparent, even if you can’t say exactly what it is. It’s like some sort of line, around which everything else revolves, although it is not straight, certainly not straight, and it is unique to that person, something like a DNA spiral, or the graph of a mathematical function. It would be easy to make a model of that person, as long as you had a piece of wire bent in the shape of that line. All you would need to do is add the other stuff, the flesh and bones, but that would just be a matter of finessing. This line is not immutable, but the laws which determine how it can bend and in which direction are inherent to it, contained within its curves like an electric charge. Sometimes it is apparent from a girl’s legs, for example, or you might realise that her hair is just right, not because she has decided to style it a certain way, but because it reveals this personal line of hers. Indrek knew that if all were well then this line was accompanied by a corresponding sound, conveyed in the girl’s voice. The rest was such advanced mathematics, you wouldn’t want to trouble yourself with it. Anyway, he should have got to know these girls, but that could never happen. All you need to do is look at them to realise that not only will their uncommonly beautiful personal lines never fully reveal themselves to you, but also that they are in total harmony, that they chime with one another, they reflect and overlap with each other. Because there is some rule which unifies them: for you they are completely, utterly, impossibly unattainable.

They didn’t normally come to this part of town, but it was Helle’s birthday today and she’d invited them to Café Moscow after their art class. There were four of them: Tonja, the eldest, with her long dark plait of hair, whose every sentence hung in the air like a question, Maarja with her chiming laughter, Liisi, who was the serious and diligent one, and of course Helle herself, who was the only one to have already got into the Art Institute, and who went to the art evening classes solely to be with her old friends. This evening Helle was in a jovial mood; she’d taken a bottle of champagne to the art class, which they’d drunk right there in the yard, straight out of the bottle. It didn’t matter that it had been a little warm, and half of it had ended up on the grass after their lengthy efforts to open it. Helle had brought four painted plastic noses with her, and they were supposed to attach them to their faces with rubber bands and walk through town. As was expected Liisi refused to do so, but the other three put their noses on, took one look at each other and started guffawing. Then the laughter wouldn’t leave them, whatever one of them said it caused one of the others to burst out giggling afresh, unrestrainedly, infectiously, for no real reason. The protesters standing on the other side of the road with their serious faces and forlorn placards with slogans like “Freedom for Aare Murakas!” and “Occupying Forces out of Estonia!”, whose ink had started to run in the rain, were also pretty funny. But suddenly Maarja’s chiming laughter came to an abrupt stop. Of course she found the people there amusing, especially on a day like today, when nothing was off limits. But it still wasn’t nice to laugh at them like that. Those guys were standing there for her as well. They stood there day in, day out like a living reproach against all that was wrong with the world, and of course it wasn’t their fault that today was the kind of day it was.

“Wait a moment!” Maarja hollered to the others and she handed her folder to Liisi. The first note she found in her pocket was a five-rouble one, which was not actually worth anything any more. She crossed the road and stuffed the note into the glass jar, trying her utmost to contain her laughter. Those funny, taciturn young people had earned it after all.

I probably already mentioned that it was evening by now, and the road was completely free of cars.

Damn that Raim, Indrek thought, when he saw his friend’s broad shoulders nudge forward. Some people were happy to look from a distance, but he just goes and takes what he wants (but Indrek was wrong, there was another reason for Raim’s behaviour).

Maarja hadn’t got back to the other side of the road when one of the young men, a sporty-looking guy with blond hair, probably a few years older than she was, started to run after her.