Rein Raud - The Death of the Perfect Sentence

In brief

This is me, right here and right now: I am a fifty-three-year-old man, husband and father of two. I am overweight, and from time to time I try to do something about it, but then I stop bothering again. I still take an interest in what is going on in the world. I have been lucky in life, I know that. I am surrounded by people whom I love. I enjoy my work, and my salary is sufficient. I have seen the world. My family wants for nothing. It is people just like me who think up those theories about us living in the best of possible universes – even if there is a lot of unfairness, there could be much more if things were different. I have plans, and I hope to fulfil them. I still feel happy when someone I don’t know praises something I have done, and I am sad if one of my friends tells me honestly that he thinks that my work is not up to standard. But I would rather be sad than live without those kinds of friends.

So then, I soon got another call from that man, and I recognised him by his voice again but this time he introduced himself as a member of staff from the State Security Committee called Oleg Makin (name unchanged), and said that he would like to discuss some matters of mutual interest. And perhaps I could suggest a café where our meeting might take place.

I said that he could come to see me at work at the Puppet Theatre. And so they came. Before they arrived I told everyone that if they wanted to see some real live KGB operatives, they would have a chance to very soon.

There were two of them. Both of them were wearing long leather coats. Oleg Makin and an Estonian who introduced himself as Viktor. Maybe his name really was Viktor, who knows. They didn’t have anything on me, although obviously they raised the subject of anti-regime views right away, to which I just said look at the newspapers, comrades: it was already 1987 and Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were in full swing. So the only thing that they could throw at me was that I’d discerned the Party’s new line before the Party itself. Then they told me that young people sometimes get carried away and need protecting against their own passions, and who better than the KGB to provide that service, as long as we know who, what, where and how. So it wouldn’t be a bad thing to meet at some café from time to time, because it’s good for us intellectuals to talk now and then. As we spoke various actors from the Puppet Theatre looked in through the door intermittently and giggled, which really annoyed my interlocutors. Eventually they realised that they weren’t going to get anything from me.

I saw Viktor several times again some years later, after Estonia had regained independence. He was working as a security guard and doorman at one of the embassies in Tallinn, a job which consisted of letting in people one by one from the queue for visas of dozens if not hundreds standing in the corridor. I had no idea whether the embassy knew about his record of public service, nor was it any of my business.

But I saw him, and I knew that he knew.

And he saw me, and he knew that I knew.

Nowadays we talk about grass-roots organisations, local committees, neighbourhood watch.

Nowadays we would say: why don’t you set up a nonprofit organisation, apply for project funding, get yourself a website, you’re bound to get some interesting proposals.

But back then it was simply called the youth recreation room, under the auspices of the district housing service. Because of course it had to be administratively “under” something, and be given a name, to make it official.

The explanation was actually somewhat simpler: two fathers had been wondering what to do about their increasingly unruly children, and so they decided to roll up their sleeves and tidy up the large cellar under the house, which basically belonged to everyone and no one. They used all the means at their disposal and equipped it with a billiards table and carom board, and some other board games which didn’t take up much space, like chess and draughts. And two pairs of dumb-bells: one quite light, the other heavier. And a medicine ball. Against one of the walls they put a bookshelf with back issues of the magazines Thunder and Youth.

Those were actually pretty decent magazines.

And so the unruly children now had a place to go. As did their friends. And sometimes their friends’ friends. There was the usual smell of damp and plaster in the cellar, but that didn’t bother them. It was more important that no one was checking up on them. And they kept order in their territory themselves: once when two of the newer boys produced two bottles of Azerbaijani fortified wine from their school bags, they were politely asked to leave and never show themselves there again.

Indrek was the first to arrive. Fortunately he knew where the key was hidden. They had started locking the cellar a while back – sometimes from the inside as well. They still played billiards there just as before, but it was not the most important thing any more.

And for several years now some printed materials with quite a different subject matter had started to accumulate amongst the back copies of those aforementioned magazines. They came as seven typed carbon copies on sheets as thin as cigarette paper. They covered the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Otto Tief government, and revealed that it was in fact the blue, black and white flag of Estonian independence, not the Nazi swastika, which the Red Army lieutenant Lumiste had taken down from Tall Hermann Tower at the end of the war. They also covered the deportations of Estonians to Siberia. By now newspapers and journals were gradually starting to write about these things too, so those were collected and kept here as well. But the cellar door was still kept locked, just in case.

Once Raim had arrived Indrek told him all the details, starting with the two men from the café, up until Pasatski Park and the black car which had taken Karl away.

“Damned fucking hell,” said Raim.

That wasn’t typical of him.

What could a KGB file tell you about a puny young man in his late twenties?

Everything, or nothing at all, depending on how you looked at things. Captain Särg preferred to assume that it said nothing at all.

He knew that the man called Karl sitting on the stool across the table was feeling edgy, that his mouth was dry. But that was more or less all that he knew for certain. Because what was in the file might turn out to be of no significance at all, it was just numbers and words until they found the key, the missing link which joined up all the pieces, which enabled the mosaic to be assembled into a picture.

Särg knew very well that it might take some time, but eventually the key was sure to be found. They were unlikely to succeed at the first attempt. If this was the first time that the young man on the other side of the table had been caught doing something illegal, if his fear was the abstract kind – the fear that in the eyes of the wider world he was suddenly no longer who he’d been before – then it would have been a different story. Then perhaps some sympathetic support would have been enough, a helping hand outstretched to someone who had slipped up. But this one here was different: he’d already made his choice. So what if this was his first time at their place.

Very well.

“You do understand why you are here?” Särg asked.

Silence. Just his gaze.

“Is it true that you work, or worked, in the transport department of the Union of Consumer Cooperatives of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic?”

“What do you mean ‘worked’? I’m still there.”

Now it was Särg’s turn to be silent and hang his head, to make sure that Karl understood what would happen to him if his employer was informed – so that he knew his whole former life had now closed behind him, like a wound which has healed over.