Rein Raud - The Death of the Perfect Sentence

Maarja opened her eyes.

The smell of pancakes was coming from downstairs.

The smile that should have promised summer

Years later Alex’s fingers still chanced across that photo from time to time when he tidied his desk drawers; understandably he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. What went wrong? Had it been his fault? At first that question had so tormented Alex that he didn’t know what to do. He could behold that image for hours on end, staring at the photo itself, or imagining it in his mind’s eye. They had been rowing on the lake, Maarja was sitting in the boat, her arms outstretched either side for support, looking directly into the camera and smiling. The photo had been taken at slightly the wrong angle, towards the sunlight, and the little camera wasn’t anyway the best. To tell the truth Alex wasn’t the most expert of photographers either, but that wasn’t the main problem. Maarja’s smile was clear to see. Alex was in the picture too, at least his finger was, having let his finger wander into the field of the lens on the tiny camera. So at least they were still together in the photograph. But not anywhere else. Alex didn’t know how to read that smile. It had promised an eternity. It had promised summer would never end. But things had turned out differently. So maybe he should have been able to make out something else in that smile as well, something which foreshadowed loss. But for as long as he looked, he couldn’t find it. Oh well, he’d been young then. His whole life had lain before him.

Maarja had in fact come to help her grandmother pick blackcurrants, but when she tried to suggest adding that to the plans for the day, Grandma just mumbled something good-naturedly and told her to be on her way. Alex and Maarja went to the lake, even though neither of them had their swimming things with them, but it turned out that the boat hire was open. A man wearing a panama hat and a T-shirt with a picture of Donald Duck on it pushed their boat into the water for them. Alex grabbed hold of the oars and then they were off, away from the swimmers and sunbathers, towards the opposite bank, towards the island which they could see at the far end of the lake. Alex looked at Maarja and smiled. Maarja looked at him and smiled back. At that moment nothing could have been clearer for them. Certainly not the lake water – that was dark, with weeds of some sort growing in it which the oars got tangled in from time to time. And so here we were. If only it could last forever. Alex steered the boat around the lake so that not even the little town was visible any more, just the trees growing on the banks and the bulrushes, and the two of them. Just like in a film. He lifted the oars on to the boat so that he could rest for a while, and he looked at Maarja.

“You know, this is what happiness feels like,” he said, but he couldn’t help feeling that his voice sounded incredibly hollow.

The camera was hanging round his neck. Moments like this are impossible to capture on film, but still.

Then he realised that Maarja was singing. Not very loudly – someone standing on the bank wouldn’t have heard. And it wasn’t a song which Alex could have known, probably not even a real song with real words which could mean real things in some real language. It was Maarja’s own song. Completely her own.

To this day he still feels lucky that he heard that once in his life.

Karl had kept putting off talking to the others. He still felt good when he was with them, and he didn’t try to avoid their company, but neither did he seek it out. To tell the truth he didn’t really think about things very much, he just went with the flow. He didn’t know – how could he? – that his condition, or something very similar to it, had been medically defined, initially in a 1974 article written by Ann Wolbert Burgess and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, in which they analysed the mental health of rape victims. It was the start of a whole new line of research in psychiatry. Anyone who is interested can find overviews of it in the specialist literature. It should be said that I am not in any way trying to compare Karl’s experiences with real victims of abuse, especially since we are dealing with an invented character. But that in no way lessens the psychological trauma which these events caused him.

The other guys tried to look after Karl in every way possible. Indrek took him to the cinema to watch The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel. It turned out that Tarts had a decent stamp collection left over from the old days, and although he no longer had any interest in it himself he fished it out for Karl to peruse. But all this made it even harder for Karl to have the discussion which he needed to have with them. The security services had still not got in touch with him. He had a telephone number which he was supposed to call if he wanted to talk, although he didn’t plan to ever use it. But his signature was there on the paperwork. He could never deny that. He’d used that to buy his way out of the cell which had stank of piss and sweat, which he’d been forced to share with one yob after another, although he was sometimes alone for several days in a row as well. That signature will always be with him, even after he explains everything to the others. Then they will know, of course. That he is not pure. That he is not like the rest of them. Not properly one of the gang. He could never be forgiven for that. But he certainly didn’t want to be back in that cell, back before he’d signed that paperwork. In fact he didn’t want anything at all any more.

In truth he hadn’t actually betrayed anyone or anything. Of course he wouldn’t have got out if he’d said nothing at all, let’s make no bones about that, but then he hadn’t said anything which the KGB did not already know.

In any case, Särg had believed that it would be enough. Or at least he pretended that he believed. It was a subtle game of course.

They were in the cellar. Karl had naturally come when he was invited; he had no reason to hide himself away.

“Ervin spoke on Radio Free Europe again yesterday,” Indrek said happily. “Damn, he pulled off a blinder.”

“Seems like that Ervin of ours has turned into something of a philosopher,” Pille said with a clear note of irony, and nodded. “Next thing you know he’ll be leading the troops into battle.”

“And what of it?” Indrek said reproachfully. “He didn’t say that the commies should be shoved into the gas chamber or anything like that, did he? He just said they should keep their distance, that there would be no place for them at the helm of an independent Estonia. Wasn’t that how you understood it too?”

Pille shrugged her shoulders.

“Maybe that kind of stuff should be decided at the elections,” she said.

“Now hold on a minute,” said Indrek, refusing to back down. “At the moment the Supreme Soviet is pulling up the ladder behind it, passing all sorts of laws, making a dog’s dinner of things, who knows how we’re going to cope? If you want my view, I don’t think that the Estonian Committee should be making so many compromises.”

Karl found their constant bickering annoying.

“Where’s Raim?” he asked.

“Oh, he’s sure to be there at the teacher’s place again,” Indrek blurted.

“What teacher?”

“Lidia Gromova,” Pille said. “The one who gets those photos from the KGB files for him, you know. She used to be the Russian teacher at our school.” Pille and Raim had gone to the same school, although Pille had been there a good few years later, and only knew about Lidia Petrovna by hearsay.

“Then he gets to deliver the films to where they need to go himself, damn it,” Indrek added. “We have to sit here like some wallflowers at a disco while other guys get to make history.”