Rein Raud - The Death of the Perfect Sentence

When he later saw that same girl dancing with one of his friends, with her arms around him and her vision dimmed by a romantic mist, he felt completely crushed. Maybe his teeth were the problem. The dentist was to blame for the state they were in. During his school years, one dreaded day in the dismal depths of winter, the nurse would look round the classroom door and yell out the names of the pupils who had to see the dentist. They would come back clutching new dental records, and one by one the whole class would go. Two or three dentists set themselves up in the school nurse’s office, where they checked every single pupil. Their equipment was old and basic, and the resulting pain was excruciating, but the dentists were in a hurry, they had several hundred children to get through. When the dentist first checked Indrek all she could do was let out a shriek. What horrible teeth! Naturally it meant a lot of tedious work, seeing that same spotty boy again and again, until she could put a tick in the box and place Indrek’s dental records on the other pile. And she did all that with equipment which was even older and more worn out than she was. Of course Indrek looked forward to those appointments even less than the dentist. Once during Christmas his first two fillings fell out, leaving him facing the New Year in much the same situation as before. It didn’t help matters that Indrek liked to suck sweets as he read; in fact he scoffed them and could polish off a whole bag of Goose Feet chews or Golden Key toffees without noticing. But one year things were different – Indrek somehow got hold of a book about scientists from the Loodus publisher’s “Golden Book” series, published during the first Estonian Republic. There he learned that the inventor of the microscope, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, never had a single problem with his teeth, because he rubbed them with a goose feather every day after brushing, just as his mother had taught him. Indrek couldn’t lay his hands on a goose feather, but he decided that a flannel would serve the same purpose, and this proved to be right – next autumn he found that for the first time he didn’t have a single cavity. But having proven his hypothesis to himself, his perseverance did not last. By the time he finished middle school his parents were forced to completely replace his rotten front teeth. What happened to the rest of his teeth was going to be his own business.

Why am I talking about Indrek’s teeth at such length? Don’t ask.

Indrek walked down Toompea and thought about turning off to sit outside the café for a while, since spring had at last fully broken out and it was the time of day when you could find company there. But today it was quiet at the café. Just two men sitting there, looking out of place in black suits, one of them observing someone or something on the other side of the square through binoculars. Indrek suddenly stopped, and the realisation of what this meant came to him in a moment, faster than lightning, like an electric shock. He’d previously had a vague awareness of it, but then it existed only theoretically, in books, or somewhere deeper down, in the horror stories which the other boys had tormented him with at night when he and his elder brother were first sent to Pioneer camp for summer. Now, however, that abstract evil had begun to spread its poison; that blackest of cats was right there in front of him, it had stepped across the threshold and into his life. What else could those two men have been put there for?

He faltered for a moment and then, as if on a whim, turned off the road and descended the steps to the square, stopping when he reached the theatre posters. There was no way those two men could have noticed him slowing down momentarily, but he could still sense their presence behind him.

His friends were standing there in the picket and evidently didn’t suspect a thing.

As Karl walked across the bumpy paving towards the grey building his heart was racing. It would continue to do so for the next half an hour. Today certainly wasn’t the first time he’d put himself in danger, and it felt the same as it always did. It was necessary for freedom, for all of us. But the panic pulsating in his ears as he moved his arms and legs through sheer force of will – that was entirely for him to deal with.

He spotted the pickets from some way off and decided to wait at a safe distance, hoping that one of his friends would notice him. Who knows, someone might still be watching the picket from a distance, even if the authorities had apparently got used to it by now. Evidently it had been decided somewhere high up that dispersing the picket would do more harm than letting it be. But he still didn’t want to provoke any trouble. He noticed one of the guys approaching – they were all younger than him: his own university days were behind him and he’d already endured two years of pointless, mind-numbing work. The youth was short, with thick-rimmed glasses, a sports bag slung over his shoulder; he looked like he could still be at school. Nothing other than the struggle for freedom had any meaning for the likes of him. Karl liked to think that these guys could learn a thing or two from him. He would have been surprised to find out what they really thought of him – after all he didn’t smoke and wasn’t into sport. And he was always so smartly dressed. He obviously took trouble over his appearance: his shirts were ironed, trousers pressed, shoes polished. A presentable exterior was a prerequisite for internal order; clear thinking required cleanliness. But he didn’t know what he looked like to others: always pale and feverish, black hair dishevelled, constantly in danger of having a nosebleed.

This guy must have been new, because Karl didn’t know his name. He beckoned Karl to one side, a couple of steps under the arch, and took a fatter than usual envelope from his bag.

“Where did you get to?” he asked. “We have to hurry now.”

“I know,” said Karl with a nod. “I couldn’t get away from work any earlier.”

“Fair enough,” the lad said, and he darted off back on to the street without saying goodbye. A moment later he was back standing where he’d been before, leaving Karl in the courtyard counting to fifty.

What was inside the envelope

Neither Karl nor the young man (his name was Anton) knew what was in the envelope, nor could they have done. In the interests of clarity it shall be revealed that it contained a videotape (Video-8 format, cutting-edge technology at the time) and a dozen photographs of Soviet soldiers using sharpened sappers’ shovels to beat peaceful demonstrators who had assembled in Rustaveli Avenue in central Tbilisi to protest against Abkhazia’s secession bid from Georgia. Nineteen people died as a result, including seventeen women. It was clear from the pictures that the soldiers had initiated the violence and were taking advantage of the opportunity to attack defenceless protestors, rather than protecting themselves against an aggressive crowd, as the official version had claimed. That was what was inside the fatter-thanusual envelope.

Karl made sure not to look at the pickets as he walked past them, just as he’d been taught. But that didn’t help.

He still had to walk through the line of sight of the binoculars, which were pointed from the direction of the café.

He didn’t notice the particular way in which Ervin ran his hand through his curly red hair at that very moment, but the two men sitting outside the café certainly did.

What? An envelope which was fatter than usual.

Where to? A certain tree hollow.

The less time these two pieces of information were known to the same person the better.

All that time Indrek had been leaning against the wall, lost in thought, unable to fully understand what was going on or how he should act. Or to be more precise: he suspected that what was happening was one of those occasional historical turbulences which could end up dragging down anyone who got too close, engulfing them in an indiscriminate torrent of events. Indrek had no intention of letting that happen to him. But nor could he just stand back and watch. He had no time to warn Karl about what was happening. He didn’t actually see the envelope being handed over, but he certainly sensed that something significant was taking place right there and then. He was also aware that the two men had got up and left the café. A moment later they were already walking past him, and as in a dream he found himself unable to resist following them. They didn’t notice him – just as the adder slithering after the field mouse often doesn’t notice the eagle circling above. Indrek glanced back over his shoulder now and again so as to avoid making the same mistake himself.

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