Rein Raud - The Death of the Perfect Sentence

“Ah, he was just asking,” the customs official sneered. “Maybe he thinks he’s got rights or something?”

“He’s an émigré now this one,” the other one sniggered from behind the screen.

“We’re still dealing with you,” the customs official informed the man, pointing at the largest of his suitcases. “Show us what’s in this one!”

With shaking hands the man turned the case on its side and snapped the lock open. Inside were neatly packed dress shirts, a stripy wool jumper and a large teddy bear with a pink ribbon around its neck. The customs official pulled it out of the case.

“Hey, Vasya, we had some sort of tip-off about drugs hidden in soft toys, didn’t we?” he shouted over to the first official, without taking his gaze off the man.

“We sure did,” the other one laughed.

“Now then,” the official announced, placing his beer on the conveyor belt and taking a pair of scissors from the drawer. “Will you cut it open yourself, or should I?”

“Please, comrades, stop it, take all my beers instead, that bear is a present for my granddaughter!” said the old man in alarm, but the customs official had already stabbed the bear in the stomach with the scissors, sending filling material flying in all directions. The official then made a show of rummaging about inside the bear’s stomach for a bit before throwing it back to the man.

“Please accept my apologies on behalf of the Soviet Customs Committee,” announced the official with a broad smile. “There was a mistake, you can go now.” He picked up the stamp and marked the man’s customs declaration.

“That’s just incredible!” said the old man, unable to restrain himself any longer. “You’re some kind of… I don’t know what…”

“Yes Comrade Citizen, I’m listening…” said the customs official. “Maybe we should do a full body search on this one?” he added to his colleague.

“No, leave the fucker alone, Sanyok,” grunted the man behind the screen. “I’m not struck on poking around his fat arse.”

By now the people in the queue had grown more and more edgy, and a woman standing behind Alex had furtively fished a twenty-mark note out of her pocket and placed it between the pages of her passport.

“Gather up your bits and bobs old man,” said the customs official in an almost friendly tone. “The homeland awaits.”

“And what exactly are you looking at?” the other official asked Alex coldly.

“Nothing,” Alex said in a similarly flat tone, and he placed his suitcase on the conveyor.

“Please tell me the grounds on which I am being detained,” Karl demanded. “And whether I am entitled to see a lawyer.”

He was making a point of behaving calmly and politely, but he looked quite different to the last time he’d been sitting on that stool by Särg’s table. He had a large bruise under his left eye, his right brow was badly messed up and his knuckles were bloody. Arrangements had been made so that Karl was not held in the investigation cell with everyone else, where information could leak out, but in a separate room, which also happened to house two alcoholic ex-boxers.

“You see, even a petty Soviet criminal can’t stand a suspected traitor,” Särg said.

“How did you reach that conclusion?” Karl asked. “I dropped the soap and slipped over.”

“Do you want medical treatment?”

Karl shrugged.

“Not yet,” he mumbled. “But I would like to see a lawyer, like I said.”

Särg leant across the table in Karl’s direction. He knew that Fyodor Kuzmich demanded results; he also knew that they wouldn’t get any today, if at all, but he had to work with what he was given.

“You yourself claim that the Soviet Union is not a law-based state, isn’t that so?” he said quietly, looking Karl directly in the eyes. “So then, we’ll let you spend some time in the version of the Soviet Union in which you and your friends believe. To start with, you are aware that there is no paperwork to prove that you are here at all? On the one hand that gives us more options. But then it gives you more too. If we come to an agreement then you’ll get a genuine medical note to take to work to say that you have been in hospital all this time, that you were taken there unconscious following a car accident. What do you reckon?”

It seemed that Karl hadn’t been listening to what Särg said at all.

“Now I remember where I have seen you before,” he said. It’s nice when a person has something other than work and family in his life. For Särg this was his stamp collection.

He first got involved in this hobby some years earlier, and quite by chance. An international criminal network had been using rare postage stamps to move money across the border. The stamps were almost impossible to discover in customs checks, but it was subsequently not too difficult to turn them back into money using well-established channels. Since Särg was known for being the best amongst his colleagues at memorising large amounts of information, and for actually enjoying it too, he was given the assignment of infiltrating the stamp-collecting community. The first thing that came to Särg’s mind was a crime novel by the Polish writer Andrzej Piwowarczyk, which he’d read several times at university, called The Open Window, in which one captain Gleb chased a criminal who was operating amongst a group of philatelists. The very first time he read the book Särg had felt an urge to start a stamp album, but he couldn’t allow himself such an expensive hobby while he was studying. Things were different now though: the security services allocated him some money for the purpose, and he was also given a couple of confiscated stamp collections to use. He was able to put together a few items from these collections to start his own, which meant that he would be taken seriously at the club which met at the Teacher’s House and among those men who gathered under the arch beside the stamp shop at the Pärnu road end of Lauristin Street (now Roosikrantsi Street). From then on Särg seriously caught the stamp-collecting bug. The first things he made sure to get were the Zumstein and Yvert et Tellier catalogues which were gathering dust in the windows of the second-hand bookshop on Mündi Street so that he could establish the overall value of his collection. Then he bought a number of full series from the stamp club – a couple of rarer items with pictures of President Konstantin Päts, some with a mail pigeon on them, and some Soviet stamps bearing a Pernau postal mark, which stayed in circulation for a short time during the German occupation, before the “Estland/Eesti” series was issued. They cost a fair bit, since people hadn’t managed to send many letters in that short period of time, so the stamps were obviously rarer and more sought after. Some time later, when he and his collection were already better known in stamp-collecting circles, he would slip it into conversations that he could arrange the sale of some Elva stamps to anyone who might be interested, since he’d been offered them but wasn’t keen. These were the rarest stamps in Estonian postal history, some of them worth thousands of dollars. It was likely that the people he was trying to track down would be interested in precisely those kinds of stamps. But much to his superiors’ surprise, Särg refused to interrogate the criminals once they were caught, justifying this by his desire to protect his reputation in the stamp-collecting world. Who knew when his connections there might become useful again? There were a lot of murky goings-on in the stamp business. His superiors could see his point. Naturally he had to hand over the collection which had been bought with KGB money, but by then his own personal collection was actually better than that one, and so he carried on going to the Teachers’ House on Sundays before meeting Galina in front of Sõprus cinema.